I just checked Ancestry.com's blog and found out that Ancestry has decided to take off the internet its Internet Biography Database. You can read the rest of the article here.
What I find interesting is that Ancestry has labeled the uproar over its behavior as "concerns about the collection." If a person has not already read about the issue on other genealogy blogs, that person might get the impression that it was not an uproar, when in fact it really was. In short, if a person just happened to only see Ancestry's latest blog article, they would not be aware that many genealogists/family historians were angry and outraged over what Ancestry did.
This blog article also states, "We have decided to remove this collection and search engine from Ancestry.com for the time being." Interesting. Does Ancestry intend to only remove this database temporarily and repost it when the uproar has died down? I guess that means that the genealogy community needs to stay on the alert when it comes to new databases that Ancestry posts.
If you want to read my post on the database issue, click here.
Posts
Indiana Genealogical Society blog
17 years ago
2 comments:
Hi Jessica,
I didn't have concerns "about the collection" as much as I had concerns about the ethics of Ancestry's management who decided it was acceptable to reproduce other people's creative content without permission. It looks like Ancestry hasn't acknowledged that part of the problem.
Steve
Hi Steve,
I agree that Ancestry appears to have not learned its lesson on this issue. They have not apologized to the genealogy bloggers who have had their work stolen by Ancestry.
I have to agree with Jasia; I think we need to keep an eye on Ancestry for a while because I have a feeling that Ancestry might try this again once everything has cooled down. I think Ancestry only backed down because the genealogy blogging community responded quickly to Ancestry's behavior. They were probably afraid of the news spreading to far and didn't want to deal with the bad publicity that would have resulted, if Ancestry hadn't responded sooner.
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