I wrote to enquire about posting images on my Ancestry family tree as many others have done and thought their reply may be of interest to others. Please move if this is not the appropriate forum.
"Thank you for contacting the National Records of Scotland (NRS) to query the reproduction of images from the ScotlandsPeople website.
There are two types of copyright images on the ScotlandsPeople site: images of records in or possibly out of private copyright (such as Roman Catholic registers), and images in or out of Crown copyright.
In terms of the private copyright images, an archive, like the NRS, can use the 'fair dealing' clauses in the copyright acts to make available a copy of a record to a researcher for personal research. If the researcher then wants to publish, broadcast or display an image, he or she needs to obtain permission from the copyright owner (and usually from the owner of the original item - the two are often different), or take the risk of a potential breach of copyright action. Such actions relating to copies of manuscript records are rare, but not unheard of. In terms of Roman Catholic records on ScotlandsPeople, you would be required to contact the Scottish Catholic Archives for permission to reproduce material.
For Crown copyright material, again the archivist can provide a copy for personal research. In the past the NRS required anyone wishing to publish, broadcast or publicly display an item to ask for permission to do so. Several years ago this was loosened to allow up to 20 Crown copyright images from ScotlandsPeople to be re-used without the need to ask us for permission and no charge is made for re-use (at one time there was), as long as a formal licence is not required.
In terms of image reproduction online, the '20 images' rule is defined as a maximum of 20 images at any one time per website or internet service, where an image is made available to more than one person. Once you open up access to your copies of the images to other people, this constitutes publication: a re-use of the images beyond the purposes of personal research that you acquired them for.
The '20 images' limit is in place to free up a lot of non-commercial and low level re-use without the need for a licence, and, since its imposition, has freed us from a great many time-consuming requests and licensing activity.
The reproduction of any Crown copyright material from ScotlandsPeople should ideally be acknowledged in the form of, for example:
Crown copyright. National Records of Scotland, Statutory Births, 644/7 669"
