RLP 109: Copyright and Plagiarism

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 109: Copyright and Plagiarism. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (46s):
Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m here with Diana Elder. Hi Diana.

Diana (55s):
Hi, Nicole.

Nicole (55s):
How are you? What have you been working on?

Diana (58s):
Well, I’ve been working on some things from the Institute that I attended, the IGHR Institute, on African-American genealogy and working in government docs. And I’m just trying to rewatch the videos, make sure I have everything I need in the notes. So I’m just taking this week because the videos disappear on Saturday night at 6:00 PM. So I’m trying to make sure I just absorbed everything I can from the teaching, which was so great.

Nicole (1m 27s):
Fantastic. It sounds like it was a really good course. What was the main thing that you learned from it?

Diana (1m 33s):
Well, you know, you always want to find new record collections that you can search. And we talked a lot about that going into government docs, such as congressional records, and back in the day, those often affected just regular people. Well, I think they still do today, but even more so in the 1800s. And so you can often find your people in those. So we talked a lot about how to search those and find those using things like JSTOR and HathiTrust. So that was fun. And then we also looked at just records that we use all the time, but with an emphasis on looking for African-Americans in them, both free people of color and enslaved individuals.

Diana (2m 21s):
So census records and all the other different types of records that we typically use. So we looked at everything with a different perspective, and I really appreciated that.

Nicole (2m 31s):
That sounds really good. I’m glad you got a chance to attend. Well today we are excited to talk about plagiarism and copyright, but before we do that, let’s do a listener spotlight.

Diana (2m 42s):
Okay. This is from Sue in Arizona, and the title of the review is “Love this Podcast. I learned about the podcast when Nicole spoke at our genealogy society meeting last year, it has since become my favorite podcast. I eagerly await each new episode. I was never interested in genealogy until shortly before my mom died in 2018. She had been researching our family since the early 1950s, when she paid someone in Georgia, $2 to go to a cemetery and transcribe info off the gravestones. So much has changed and Diana and Nicole are teaching me so much about how to take mom’s research and go further. I recently bought their book and hope to take one of their classes soon.”

Diana (3m 23s):
Thank you so much, Sue. That is a really fun review. I love it when we can take our parent’s research and then go forward.

Nicole (3m 31s):
Yeah, that’s really what you did with grandpa’s research.

Diana (3m 35s):
That’s exactly what I did. And I love that. I love that connection with him and his ancestors and the research.

Nicole (3m 43s):
All right, today, we are talking about Copyright and Plagiarism. So I’m guessing a lot of you are feeling a little nervous or anxious about this topic because there’s a lot to understand, and it seems a little scary sometimes. I know I felt that way, but after studying it at ProGen this month and the ProGen study group, and really studying Fair Use and becoming more familiar with the laws and statutes and copyright, I’m feeling a little bit better about it. So hopefully between Diana’s article on our blog and our discussion today, we can help you feel a little more at ease about understanding Copyright and what we can use. So have you ever wondered if you can quote something or use a record, a photograph in your family history book, maybe you want to use a town map that you thought would be perfect to illustrate your point in a research report or maybe a presentation and with all the proliferation of these images and information on the internet, there needs to be some understanding of plagiarism and copyright as family historians and genealogists.

Nicole (4m 47s):
We want to make sure that we are ethical and on the right side of the law. So even though it can be confusing to learn about copyright law, there are some general guidelines that can really help us in understanding it. So let’s talk about some of those and just kind of go through the guidelines today.

Diana (5m 5s):
The reason that I actually wrote this blog post that we’re kind of referencing, and that we’ll have a link to in the show notes is because I recorded just yesterday, a lecture for BYU education week, which will be virtual, and BYU is very concerned about Copyright and as presenters, we had to make sure that we weren’t using anything in our slides that was copyright protected. So I discovered a couple of neat websites that we’re going to share later on in the podcast that I had never seen before that are created by Brigham Young University, or BYU as we like to call it, and it just got me thinking again about copyright as something that should really be always on our minds.

Diana (5m 49s):
One of the questions that I always think of is this one, I’m just writing this for my family, what does it matter? Well, I think we all know that anything that we put out there, we send a cousin our research report, there’s chances that they’re going to put that on their Ancestry tree or send it to someone else who might put it on our website. We really don’t know where our work will show up. And so we need to make sure that whatever we are producing, you know, that we have made sure that we’re not plagiarizing and that we are not using something that is copywritten and that we shouldn’t use.

Diana (6m 32s):
And Genealogy Standards has an entire section that’s titled integrity and ownership, and helps us understand that as ethical genealogists, we need to think about plagiarism and copyright infringement. So when I teach about writing research reports, I teach that we always need to cite our sources. And then I also teach that whenever you are using a little bit of a quote from maybe a county history, you always want to include a citation to show where that came from. When we cite our sources with complete and informative source citations that protects us from plagiarism, but not Copyright.

Diana (7m 12s):
So let’s look at an example. We want to use this source citation for every fact that’s not common knowledge, so when we’re writing a research report and we’re talking about the first settlers in a county, but we didn’t know that right, we got that information from somewhere else and so we would need to cite our source. Usually it’s a county history that’s what I like to use for those types of facts. But if I’m also talking in the report about the year the United States entered World War II, we wouldn’t need to cite that because that is common knowledge and I wouldn’t need to include a source citation for that. Now we have to just kind of use our common sense to think about what is common knowledge and what needs to citation.

Diana (7m 55s):
So I would say maybe err on the side of of citing a little bit too much than too little. Now we can use direct quotes if we put quotation marks around them. And anytime we’re using three words or more, we want to use those quotation marks. And if you remember back to your college days, that was kind of the rule. Make sure if you’re using somebody else’s words, you’re giving them credit. So what do you do to get away from putting quotes around everything in your report? Well, you can study that history of the county and maybe you’re using two or three different sources to understand the county and then don’t look at it and then write it up, get it in your head, put in your own wording, your own writing.

Diana (8m 41s):
And then you would cite the source of the information, but you wouldn’t have to do direct quotes for everything because it’s in your own words. Now there’s an excellent article to give you a lot more help with this and it’s by Elizabeth shown mills, it’s her, QuickLesson 15: Plagiarism, five Copywrongs of Historical Writing. And I love this article because she gives specific examples of the wrong and the right way to use the works of others in our reports. So I highly recommend you go take a look at that, bookmark that study that, and it’ll really give you a feel for how you should use this work as you’re writing your own reports.

Diana (9m 23s):
Another really good resource is the National Genealogical Society Publication Guidelines for Sharing information with Others. And that talks a lot about respecting the work and the rights of others. So I think we don’t have to necessarily remember every little detail, but it’s good to have resources.

Nicole (9m 42s):
That’s so great. Those are really good resources for understanding plagiarism and sharing. So let’s talk about whose responsibility it is to understand these copyright issues. The answer is of course, that we all need to shoulder the responsibility to learn about and understand them. We, as genealogists are using a lot of material that other people have created. So we need to understand what’s allowed and what’s not many resources are out there to help us learn. Of course, Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist’s blog has a lot of information about copyright. There is a free video from Judy Russel on Rootstech 2020, and that’s all about copyright.

Nicole (10m 22s):
It’s called 2019: Year of the Copyright and that’s available on the Rootstech video archive. We enjoyed that lecture. So make sure you watch that. What I would really recommend though is reading Judy Russell’s chapter in the second edition of Professional Genealogy, which is devoted to copyright issues. And she has an APG, Association of Professional Genealogists, webinar that is right along the same lines as that chapter. So if you’re a member of APG, you can log in and go to their members only section and view this recorded lecture that she did back in 2012. And I thought it was really useful for understanding Copyright and Fair Use.

Nicole (11m 4s):
There’s also a book that I recommend that I have been studying it’s by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack. Who’s a certified genealogist, it’s called Carmack’s Guide to Copyright and Contracts, a Primer for Genealogists Writers and Researchers. And what I like about it is that it’s a conversational book about what you can and can’t do and what copyright is. And then she has at the end, some of the chapters kind of some frequently asked questions and her responses, which I really appreciated because it helps to really apply the copyright law. So if you are wanting to really get clear on copyright for genealogists, I would go ahead and get this book. I just ordered it on Amazon.

Nicole (11m 46s):
It was published in 2005 and the book is not intended as legal advice, but I think it’s really helpful for getting a deeper understanding about copyright.

Diana (11m 57s):
That sounds like a wonderful resource. I’m so glad you ordered it. So then I can borrow it, right?

Nicole (12m 4s):
Absolutely.

Diana (12m 4s):
I like to share books with you. And in fact, it’s so funny because I was so excited to tell you about a new book I was reading and you said, yeah, don’t you remember that? I ordered that and told you about that about a year ago. So sometimes I forget it. Well, let’s talk about what we can use because there are things we can use. And there are several terms that we need to know and understand, and we’re going to talk about each one and hopefully take the mystery out of them, public domain, creative commons, and Fair Use. So let’s start with public domain. Public domain refers to creative works that can be used without obtaining permissions because they’re not protected by copyright laws and these are available to us to use.

Diana (12m 52s):
So here are the rules. There’s two that really help us. First of all, materials in the public domain can be used without concern. So as of 2020, that is anything lawfully published in the United States before 1925. And that’s a rolling year. So in 2021, that would be anything published before 1926. So every year that moves forward, we can use another year of works. Now, does that mean that we can just use it without any attribution? No. We still have to remember using our source citations to give attribution.

Diana (13m 32s):
So for example, let’s say that there was a great poem that was written in 1925, and I’ve been wanting to use that in a family history book because it illustrates something really well. And I’m going to publish this book and I want to use the entire thing. Well, I couldn’t use it until it became clear of Copyright. And I would of course give attribution to whoever the poet was, but I would be able to use that and publish that because it would now be in the public domain. The other thing to remember is that any work produced by a federal employee of the United States federal government cannot be copywritten and is in the public domain.

Diana (14m 15s):
And again, we would give attribution to the creator. Now note that is only for the United States federal government, other countries are not that way at all. In fact, if you’ve ever used any of the websites that have British records, they always have very strict copyright rules, right on the website to let you know that that work has copywritten, but the United States federal government, anything done by them, that means photographs, that’s writings, any work document produced is in the public domain. Now what about all those works after 1925?

Diana (14m 56s):
What if there’s something that was written in 1970 and it’s perfect for our family history or for our presentation, then what do we do? Well, there’s different criteria to judge whether that work is in the public domain and some things are, so we need a little bit of help. And there’s a great website that I linked to in the blog post. And it’s put on by Cornell University Library and it’s titled the Copyright Information Center. And it gives you so many details about whether something is in the public domain and it’s an amazing website.

Diana (15m 37s):
So I encourage you to go take a look at that website, get familiar with it, bookmark it in your web browser so that you can check things.

Nicole (15m 46s):
That’s wonderful. I love that there’s so many things in the public domain that we can use. All right, let’s talk about the creative commons license. Now, creative commons is a nonprofit organization that provides licenses to creators that they can attach to their work, giving permission for people to use it. So if you see that there’s a photo you want to use, and it has a creative commons license for anyone to use, then you can take that and use it. And usually there’s some kind of information about, they want to have attribution, the person who created it. So if you use it, you should cite it to basically, but it’s a great way for people who create works to allow others to use the works that they create.

Nicole (16m 31s):
So for example, Find a Grave. Sometimes you’ll see that people who take the headstone photo have added a caption that says this work is licensed under creative commons, attribution, non-commercial international license. You are free to use this photo for personal use, as long as you attribute to the person who took it and then has her name, and you can contact her if you need a high resolution one. So isn’t that great that sometimes you can find those that are in the creative commons and there’s databases out there where you can search for images that are in the creative comments that people have shared. And given you license to use that, if you find an image that’s not in the creative commons or the public domain, then you can just contact people and ask them for personal license for yourself to use it.

Nicole (17m 15s):
Just ask them permission. But it’s nice when you can find a creative commons, that’s given a blanket license to anybody who wants to use it. So pay attention to that. And sometimes it will say that it’s a non-commercial type of thing. So if you’re wanting to print a bunch of copies of the photo and sell them, then that probably wouldn’t be non-commercial. So you have to think about it that way too. While I’m talking about Find a Grave, let’s go down a tangent here, on Find a Grave, some people on their profile page say, please do not use any pictures I post, unless you ask for permission, I may are well within their rights that people should ask permission first. So, and you’ll find that it really varies from person to person, a lot of people and Find a Grave take photos just because they’re volunteers and they don’t mind if you use them, but check their profile page and see what they say.

Nicole (18m 4s):
And, and always err, on the side of asking permission, if you can, we’ll talk about Fair Use in a minute, but there are some great databases like I mentioned, like Flickr, they have the commons, which is a database of photographs with various creative commons licenses. And this is a great way to explore and learn about all the different permissions. And some of those are even in the public domain, it can be useful for your family history work, just to remember if no creative commons licenses referenced and it’s not in the public domain, then you can always just ask permission via email or a letter.

Diana (18m 40s):
Right? I know that when I was working on my presentation, I wanted to use the Shared CentiMorgan project graphic that’s on DNA Painter. And I wanted to use a slide of that cause my lecture was on using DNA to solve a family mystery. And it was great because Blaine Bettinger has a creative commons license right there that says with attribution, you’re free to use that graphic. And I was so glad, you know, so thank you Blaine. It’s really nice when we find things like that or we can feel good about using them and giving credit where credit is due. So let’s talk about Fair Use. This is what we do when we want to just use a brief excerpt of something that’s still under copyright.

Diana (19m 27s):
So let’s go back to that poem example. Let’s say that that is still under Copyright and I’d like to just include a portion. Maybe I don’t want to do all 10 stanzas, maybe I just want four lines. So if that were still under copyright, I could take those four lines out, give attribution, put them in quotes, whatever, and I could call that Fair Use. Now the thing about Fair Use is that there’s no hard and fast rule. And so if the poet was going to take me to court and say, you used four lines of my poem without permission and you published it and now you’re making tons of money, then I could be in trouble because the judge would take a look at the entire work, would probably look at the entire book, he’d look at the entire situation.

Diana (20m 20s):
And then he would have to determine if what I did fell under fair use or not. I think a lot of times we get so worried about it we just don’t use anything. There is a great article it’s called Measuring Fair Use The Four Factors and there’s just four things to think about: the purpose and character of your use; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion taken; and the effect of the use upon the potential market. So let’s look at that poem example again, what was the purpose and character of my use while it was put in a family history book?

Diana (20m 60s):
You know, let’s just say that I really wasn’t making money on it, which I probably wouldn’t have been. And the nature of the copyrighted work, it was a family history just published for family members. And I only took four lines out of 10 stances. And the effect of the use upon the potential market? Well, is this going to keep someone from purchasing the book of poems that it’s in to get the complete poem? Probably not. Nobody would probably even see it there. So a judge would probably rule in my favor and I really have no legal training, so I could be completely wrong about that. But in my mind, that would have been Fair Use. Now, if I was to take that entire poem and publish it in a magazine and I was selling that magazine and maybe it was a magazine full of poems and it would keep people from purchasing the poet’s own book, I’d be pretty sure that I’d be ruled against in that case.

Diana (21m 56s):
So again, we have to use common sense and think about Measuring Fair, Use The Four Factors. So there’s a link to that in the blog post so that you can also have that in your toolbox.

Nicole (22m 8s):
Great. Thank you for that explanation. Brigham Young University has made available a couple of websites that are really helpful for making informed decisions about Fair Use and Copyright. So let’s talk about a couple of them. The first one is called Decision Trail and it’s an interactive website that walks you through a series of questions to help you decide when you can use someone else’s work legally or when you need to obtain permission. So they have videos and examples, and this can help you understand the issues. Another one that they have is called Fuel the Fair Use Evaluation Log. So this website has you fill out your personal information and then have an account so that you can have a record of your log or your questions, but you can skip this if you don’t want to keep a record of it.

Nicole (22m 56s):
So what you do is you go in and you answer a series of questions related to the Fair Use of something that you want to use. And then when you’re completed with the survey, your answers are compiled and the interactive Fair Use predictor will show how likely your use of an image or quote falls under fair use and would be okay. So you can go in there and kind of get an idea based on the questions, if what you’re doing falls under fair use or not, and it’s not intended to be legal advice, it’s just kind of an educational guide. So the same thing goes for this podcast. It’s not legal advice. It’s just trying to help bring up awareness of this issue and encourage you to go learn more about it.

Diana (23m 39s):
We really liked that little tool. I played with that a little bit and put in some things, and it was pretty simple, basically takes you through those four factors of Fair Use and makes you really think about it cause you have to make a decision and then gives you an idea of how safe you’re going to be. Well, let’s look at an example of Fair Use that I just barely did, right? Just presented virtually a presentation for the NGS conference Settlers of Indian territory. And I wanted to use a lot of maps and images. You know, anytime you’re doing a presentation and especially where it has a lot to do with locality, you want to have maps for somebody to look at as they’re listening to use speaking.

Diana (24m 23s):
So I did my Google search and found a really great map on the Library of Congress website. And as I scroll down the page, I saw the section that said rights and access that let me know that the maps were published prior to 1922, or they were produced by the United States government, or both. And so they would not have any copyright restrictions because we know, anything published prior to 1925 or by the United States government is free of copyright. So that was really great to know that. So the library of Congress website is a good place to go to find materials that you can use.

Diana (25m 5s):
But of course I would always want to give attribution and so I create a source citation to show exactly where I got that map from. But then I was looking for some other maps and I came across a really beautiful set that’s on the Oklahoma Historical Society website. And the set of maps was titled Maps of Tribal Nation Land. And it was produced by a woman named Katie Bush and copywritten in 2018. And that copyright was held by the Society. So these maps were definitely not in the public domain and I really wanted to use them because they illustrated so well the evolvement of the boundaries of Indian territory.

Diana (25m 47s):
So I sent an email to the webmaster and said, I want to use these maps in a presentation, it’s for a conference. Is that going to be okay? And they very graciously said yes. And they had a formal email they sent to me and said, you can use these maps for this specific purpose. And I have that filed and then on the actual source citation in the presentation I put used with permission. So, you know, anyone would know, I didn’t just steal a screenshot of those maps. I actually asked for permission. I think that sometimes we’re afraid to ask for permission and we never know, unless we try all they can say is no, I’d prefer you don’t use it and then we look for something else

Nicole (26m 30s):
I’ve done the same. And I found it a photograph of a regiment from the Civil War on an Alabama State Archives website. I think it was something having to do with Alabama, like a state library or archive website. And I asked them permission if I could use that in a RootsTech lecture. And they gave me permission and let me also use it on a blog post. So that was great. You know, often these types of institutions have a formal method for getting back to people quickly with licenses to use certain photographs that they would like to use or whatever it is. So I think it’s a good idea to just always seek to get permission.

Nicole (27m 11s):
And if you’re in a tricky position where you can’t get permission because they are not responding or you can’t find the email address of the person, then you can consider well, is what I’m going to use this for Fair Use? And if it is an educational setting, it’s non-commercial, and you feel that it’s Fair Use, then you know, it might be okay to use, but just use caution because Fair Use is an exception to the copyright law. So we really want to respect other people’s copyrights and not use that exception unless there’s a reason why we can’t, you know, get the permission that we need. So it’s good to know about that. When I was a teacher, we had to understand Fair Use a lot because in an educational setting, we would often need to use things for tomorrow’s lesson plan that we hadn’t had time to get permission for.

Nicole (28m 0s):
So in that case, there’s a whole section of the copyright law about what teachers and educators are allowed to do. Like when they don’t have time, they can go ahead and make copies of an article and distribute it to the class. But if they’re planning to use that same set of copies the next year, then they absolutely need to get permission because they have plenty of time until next year to get permission. So you can see how there’s all kinds of little nitpicky things in the law that are interesting, and that allow for educators and, and things to have some, some rights to Fair Use. But when it comes down to it, we need to respect people’s Copyright and get their permission.

Diana (28m 40s):
I think we should always just remember how we would feel, you know, if we wrote something or we took a great photograph or something we put out there and then it was being copied everywhere, you know, just kind of put yourself in the position of the person who is the creator of a work.

Nicole (28m 58s):
Yes, I agree. Well, thank you. That was an interesting discussion today of copyright. I hope that everyone will go learn a little bit more about it, especially if you already have the book Professional Genealogy, the second edition edited by Elizabeth Shown Mills. Just go read that chapter and study that. And you can also find a lot of great, helpful articles online and go check out Diana’s article with all of the links to various helpful tools, especially those ones at BYU’s website,

Diana (29m 26s):
Right. Just consider this a little part of your education to go get yourself beefed up on Copyright and Plagiarism. So you make sure you’re just an ethical genealogists. That’s what we all want to be. So good luck everyone, and have fun researching.

Nicole (29m 40s):
All right. Bye.

Diana (29m 43s):
Bye. Bye.

Nicole (29m 43s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com. To share your progress and ask questions join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our eCourse or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.