[open-bibliography] [pd-discuss] Free BMD and PD Calculators

Mon Sep 27 22:49:56 UTC 2010

 On 09/24/10 22:15, Tom Morris wrote:

> I don't know if it's the reason behind FreeBMD's licensing, but
> historically the genealogical community has been gun shy of commercial
> ventures due to past bad experiences snarfing up freely provided data
> and then putting it behind pay walls and selling it back to the people
> that provided it.  That, and the sleazy business practices of
> companies like Ancestry have probably left a bad taste in people's
> mouths about commercial usage.  I think the objections can be overcome
> if the arguments are framed correctly, but it'll take some work.
>
> Tom
>
The freebmd faq says:

The ONS granted the right to place the database on the Internet on the
condition that access to it be free of charge. Any commercialisation of
the database would require the ONS' prior and very improbable
authorisation.

(http://www.freebmd.org.uk/FAQ.html#9).

Public bodies have been so reluctant to allow general access to
genealogical documents in the past - mainly on the grounds that general
free availability would remove the revenue they need to preserve old
documents - that where they do allow limited transcription by
volunteers, those volunteers will generally self-police and block
attempts to consolidate the data in any public place. This applies more
to parish registers than the BMDs (but note that freedmb is only a free
index to the records, and does not have a copy of the records
themselves). For parish registers and censuses there are freereg.org.uk
and freecen.org.uk, but there is actually far more transcribed material
deliberately buried away in member-only yahoo groups etc, representing
(literally) many person-years of skilled volunteer transcription work.
Like Tom suggests, tread carefully or you may alienate the very people
who should be natural okf supporters.

Graham