John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 1732

In the discussion here about copyrights, there is a confusion between a presentation and the facts which are contained therein.

Let us say that I go to a public cemetery and transcribe the information on the stones and publish this.  My presentation of the material is copyrighted.  Under the copyright law, another individual or company is not permitted to reproduce my presentation by photocopies, photographs, or by any other methods such as retyping or scanning without permission.  Nothing prevents the second individual from going to the cemetery and compiling his own set of information and publishing it.  He may have the same facts as I did.  This shows that the names and dates are not the material being copyrighted but that the presentation is what is being copyrighted.

Here is a real life situation.  The printers of map books deliberately introduce errors into their maps.  If they find that someone else is publishing a map with these same errors, they have a good case for suing for damages.  Authors of books introduce errors in the index in the form of nonexistent people, subjects, or page numbers.

There is a real life situation in the Germanna community in the " Before Germanna " booklets where the authors used microfilms of the German church records and found the ancestries of many Second Colony people.  They published a series of booklets as a result.  Aside from a very limited use of information taken from these books ("fair use"), it is a violation of the copyright law to issue a report, book, or story based on the information in these books.  It does not matter that the information was retyped, reformatted, or scanned; there is no escape from the fact that the information came from a copyrighted book and not from the original source.  If you want to issue a report(s) similar to that in " Before Germanna ", you can obtain copies of the films and do your own transcription and translation.  (Remember that the authors had to transcribe the original German handwriting which is a creative endeavor itself.  What you read is their English translation of a German transcription.  These are not the original facts.)

As I have written these notes, I have tried to refrain from using too much of the information that was found by Zimmerman and Cerny in the " Before Germanna " booklets.  I do not hesitate to quote isolated facts, and I try to identify the source.  Some of the information that they have covered has been found by other people in the same sources.  These people have permitted the publications of their findings.  For example, I have published the origins of the Blankenbakers, as found by Margaret James Squires and by Richard Plankenbuehler.  No restrictions have been placed on the use of the information except making copies of the presentations in BEYOND GERMANNA .  Another notable example is the research on the Gaar family by the Theodore Walker family, which has generously permitted its open publication in BEYOND GERMANNA .

(Note: The contents of BEYOND GERMANNA n and of these Notes are copyrighted.  I have always permitted the use of limited amounts of the material upon request.)
(11 Aug 03)