RootsChat respects copyright and will not allow information to be posted that potentially infringes copyright rules.
Generally all information from a commercial source (websites, CDs etc.) will be protected. Precise details of the permitted use of the information held will be set out in the license agreement. In most cases this will allow use for your own personal research but not for responding to others requests for lookups.
Census and BMD information is available freely from records offices, local libraries etc. and this information can be posted on RootsChat provided "Crown Copyright" is acknowledged somewhere in the posting and that the information is transcribed accurately and not in a misleading way.
A number of commercial firms have put together collections of this Crown Copyright data and whilst they don't own the copyright to the original data they do own their own transcriptions. Information posted on RootsChat that is clearly cut and pasted or transcribed from a commercial source will be removed in the interests of protecting RootsChat.
Further posts will be made in due course referring to detailed specific copyright issues as required.
