Introduction :
This copyright notice forms part of the Terms and Conditions 
governing use of the website, Arborealis.
The purpose of this copyright notice is to inform all visitors to Arborealis that copyright law, licences for sharing (subject to restrictions), and widely accepted codes of conduct and ethics in research and publication govern the responsible and ethical use of information;—and that, by extension, the responsible and ethical use of information published to Arborealis applies to users of this site.
Most people understand the common courtesy involved in asking for permission to use something that belongs to someone else. However, a surprising number of people operate under the incorrect, and illegal, assumption that, “If it’s on the internet, it’s free,” — “it” being another person’s intellectual property. If the creator of intellectual property makes some or all of their property available freely and posts a notice to that effect, there are often associated limitations or restrictions. Copyright is an extensive subject, and many find the subject confusing. The second purpose of this copyright notice is to explain the subject as it applies to visitors to Arborealis.
Considerable resources, time, and effort have been expended to bring literary and research work to publication online at Arborealis. By visiting this site, you accept the conditions for responsible and ethical use of information as outlined in the following linked paragraphs:
- Copyright notice
- Creative Commons license
- Public Domain
- * Rules summarized *
- Caveat
- Appeal for common courtesy
- Legal disclaimer
- See also
- Recommended reading
- Postscript
- End notes
Copyright notice :
This website, Arborealis, is published in Canada, and is protected under the Copyright Act of Canada. 🇨🇦 The site in its entirety, in substance and in form, was created by Alison Kilpatrick, editor, who with her heirs and representatives hold the copyright in Arborealis. You do not have the right to copy or publish pages or parts of pages from the Arborealis site onto your website, or into a book, a computer, a website, or any other media, without the written permission of the editor.
Many people assume mistakenly that their home country has legal jurisdiction in copyright matters over information published to any medium including the internet. However, this is not the case, for example: U.S. copyright laws do not apply to literary, artistic, and other works created in the United Kingdom, and vice-versa. Such works would be subject to the rights and restrictions in copyright legislation enacted within the United Kingdom.
Use the contact form to request permission to use or cite information presented on Arborealis. If you obtain information, please provide the appropriate source reference .
The following paragraphs outline specific exemptions from the copyright rule stated above.
Duration of copyright :
Under the Copyright Act of Canada, copyright duration is:
- Life + 70 years (death in 1972 or later), except certain posthumous works
- Life + 50 years (death before 1972)
Recitation of the facts :
The facts stated on Arborealis are not copyright to Alison Kilpatrick, or to anyone. This means that the fact of someone’s birth, marriage, or death is not copyrightable to any person, real or corporate. You may gather such facts from this website—but just the facts and not the manner in which those facts are presented on Arborealis—and use them freely. Examples of facts include dates and places of birth, marriage, and death, the names of parents and siblings, and nature of trade or occupation. Please acknowledge the source of this information by providing an appropriate source citation and a link back to Arborealis arborealis.ca.
Caveats :
- This exception applies only to what is reasonable for your private, non-commercial genealogical research.
- The recitation of facts obtained from this website is subject to Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy laws.
- Neither can any one or a combination of facts be used in activities which violate Criminal Codes, civil law, or formal rules of conduct or informal codes of ethics.
Fair dealing :
The Copyright Act of Canada (R.S.C., 1984, c. C-42) 
laws-lois.justice.gc.ca, provides an exception if the re-use qualifies under fair dealing. Fair dealing includes research, private study, education, parody, satire, criticism or review, and news reporting. The dealing must be for one of these listed purposes, and the dealing must be fair. The word, fair, has not been defined in the legislation, but by case law, viz., in Hubbard v. Vosper (1972):
It is impossible to define what is ‘fair dealing’. It must be a question of degree. You must consider first the number and extent of the quotations and extracts. Are they altogether too many and too long to be fair? Then you must consider the use made of them. If they are used as a basis for comment, criticism or review, that may be a fair dealing. If they are used to convey the same information as the author, for a rival purpose, that may be unfair. Next, you must consider the proportions. To take long extracts and attach short comments may be unfair. But, short extracts and long comments may be fair. Other considerations may come to mind also. But, after all is said and done, it must be a matter of impression. As with fair comment in the law of libel, so with fair dealing in the law of copyright. The tribunal of fact must decide.
Source: CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada (2004) 1 S.C.R. 339 at paragraph 52. Online at Wikipedia: Fair dealing in Canadian copyright law 
en.wikipedia.org. — Visitors are encouraged to visit this link, as these provisions apply to proposed re-use of material published to Arborealis.
No benefit to be derived :
No part of this website may be re-used for commercial purposes, or appear in any website or other publication or medium that has links to financial interests or other benefits as explained below:
This general rule applies to any media† associated with any kind of commercial interest, whether for personal, private, entrepreneurial, charitable, or educational purposes, whether the person, group, or organization is organized on a for profit or not-for-profit basis, and no matter how small the benefit, whether that benefit is monetary, barter, in kind, &c., tangible or intangible.
† Media include books, brochures, newsletters, newspapers, electronic and social media, billboards, websites, mobile applications, movies, television, radio, etc., or any thing used to present, communicate, transfer, or store content.
This rule also applies to organizations, individuals, websites, or other media that feature advertisements, requests for donations, pay-per-view, and other monetary, tangible, or intangible benefits reasonably anticipated by this statement. Exemptions occur only after specific written permission has been obtained from the editor of Arborealis.
The purpose of this general rule should be apparent, that it is unethical to profit upon, defray expenses, or attract a benefit by re-using any of the literary, transcription, and indexing work published by Alison Kilpatrick to Arborealis.
Creative Commons Licence :
Some pages on Arborealis will display a Creative Commons licence at the end of the article, as illustrated below. The licence is Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed creativecommons.org (accessed 24th Nov. 2020). “This licence allows re-users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.” Readers are encouraged to visit the Creative Commons link, above, to learn more about this licence.
CC BY-NC-ND includes the following conditions:
: BY – Credit must be given to the creator
: NC – Only non-commercial uses of the work are permitted
: ND – No derivatives or adaptations of the work permitted
Only those pages, or the part(s) thereof so indicated, which display this badge are shareable under this licence, and subject to the conditions recited under the CC BY-NC-ND sticker, above. When in doubt about the application of this particular Creative Commons licence, please contact the editor for clarification with respect to your unique (and non-commercial, non-derivative) purpose. Use of this Creative Commons licence, where permitted, requires the citation of relevant source references and the provision of a link back to the source page here on Arborealis.
Public Domain :
Some pages or parts of pages on Arborealis will display a Public Domain sticker at the end of an article (not in the sidebar), to indicate that the material presented is free of known copyright restrictions. Only material created by Alison Kilpatrick, for Arborealis, may be designated by us as given over, or not, to the Public Domain.
The Creative Commons Public Domain mark indicates works or materials produced by others that are no longer restricted by copyright. Readers are urged to visit this link to learn more about Public Domain and how to use this mark.
“These will typically be very old works. It is not recommended for use with works that are in the public domain in some jurisdictions if they are also known to be restricted by copyright in others.”
— Creative Commons
creativecommons.org
(accessed 27th Nov. 2020)
The mark might also appear where Alison Kilpatrick has decided to place some of her own work in the public domain.
Only those pages, or the part(s) thereof, displaying this badge are shareable under this licence.
Rules summarized :
The rules followed on Arborealis are as follows:
- Intellectual property, often referred to as “material,” which has been created by another person, will include the Creative Commons licence deemed appropriate by that individual.
- Creative Commons licences range from CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED, which provides the greatest freedoms/fewest restrictions but is not in the Public Domain. The licences proceed through several gradations of decreasing freedom/more restrictions, that is: CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND, CC BY-NC, and CC BY.
Public Domain is indicated by the licence, CC0 1.0 DEED or CC0 1.0 Universal. Only the person who surrendered the rights or copyright to the work worldwide may release intellectual property into the Public Domain. - Though we take care to provide information about Creative Commons licences for others’ work, it is up to the individual or reader to corroborate the Creative Commons licence associated with an image, words, or other intellectual property, and the related rights (freedoms) and restrictions.
- Alison Kilpatrick reserves all rights in her intellectual property, including the right to assign, or not, a particular Creative Commons licence, or to release any of her work, or not, into the Public Domain.
- Where Alison Kilpatrick has not specified a Creative Commons licence for a particular page or part thereof, by default visitors should assume that the page is under copyright.
- See also the Caveat and Appeal to Common Courtesy.
When in doubt, use the contact form to ask for clarification about appropriate use for transcripts of archival and other records presented on Arborealis.
Caveat :
For any words, articles, posts, essays, extracts, or transcripts, &c., presented on Arborealis, which do not bear a Creative Commons or Public Domain sticker, visitors to Arborealis should use our contact form to pose questions about re-use of information published to Arborealis. Visitors are advised to consult the laws of the country in which the material was originally published to determine whether the work is out of copyright according to the legislation enacted in the jurisdiction of publication, and the policies and regulations developed from the laws thereby enacted.
Appeal for common courtesy :
Public domain material has been published, or is in the works for publication, to Arborealis. Readers will be able to identify such material by the appended source citation. Users are asked to consider the considerable work and resources applied by Alison Kilpatrick in order to bring this information to you, free of charge. For these reasons, and by using this site, users agree to attribute any transcripts of out-of-copyright material to the transcriber. Attribution involves citing your sources, and adding the words, “transcribed by Alison Kilpatrick, Arborealis arborealis.ca.” If re-used on your website, please provide the full source citation(s) and a link back to the source page here on Arborealis.
Legal disclaimer :
The information published to Arborealis is provided for general information purposes and to provide guidance on matters of interest for the personal, not-for-profit use of the reader. No part of this site’s contents purports to provide legal or professional advice.
Information published to Arborealis is updated periodically. While every effort and great care, subject to available resources, have been taken to publish accurate material to Arborealis, errors in reading ancient documents, in making transcripts, &c., have the potential to introduce human error. The owner and her heirs and representatives make no warranty or representation as to the quality and/or accuracy of the content published to this website. The website and its contents are presented “as is” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance, merchantability, and fitness for a particular purpose. By visiting this site, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Arborealis, Alison Kilpatrick, and her heirs and representatives against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or expenses, &c., as would be reasonably anticipated by similar disclaimers.
Reproduction, re-use, distribution, transmission, &c. of any part of Arborealis is prohibited by our Copyright notice, except where there is a notice otherwise in the “End Notes” of a particular page or written permission has been obtained from the owner and editor of this site, Alison Kilpatrick.
Visitors to Arborealis are advised to treat the information, essays, and blog articles published to this site as secondary sources. In other words, data obtained by Alison Kilpatrick and presented on Arborealis, even with source citations, are not primary (original) sources. As a responsible genealogist, historian, or other visitor who adheres to high research standards, you already know that you should corroborate my findings.
As a convenience to our readers, we include a number of third party links when they appear to be informative and pertinent to a topic. However, we neither provide guarantees about the information provided on other sites nor do we accept responsibility for another site’s contents and its operator.
Our policy is to confine genealogical material to deceased persons, only. If we have made an error in this regard, or if you find an error or discrepancy on this site, please contact the editor. The editor will review such suggestions, subject to the understanding that we are not in the business of contriving revisionist history.
On that note, we subscribe to the notion that, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (Lesley Poles Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953.) Sometimes our ancestors engaged in behaviours and practices which we find abhorrent and which are unacceptable today. Examples include enslavement and other forms of exploitation including colonialism. Please be advised that by reporting on these facets of our family or common social history, in no way does the editor of Arborealis condone the perpetuation of such practices and other forms of repression in the modern era. Our history is presented here unglossed, as honestly as can be ascertained from occasionally very limited records, for our better education and the always timely reminder that, truly, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (attr. George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I, 1905-06.)
See also :
- Assertion of copyright over edited and/or annotated material
- Copyright Act (Canada), an outline enwikipedia.org
- Fair dealing (Canada), an outline en.wikipedia.org
- A guide to copyright. ised-isde.canada.ca. Published by the Government of Canada, Canadian Intellectual Property Office.
Recommended reading :
In addition to the myriad of accessible and easy-to-understand resources which can be found on the internet, including websites for education and research institutions, one of my favourite blog sites is that of The Legal Genealogist legalgenealogist.com, written and published by Judy G. Russell. Though written with American laws and practices in mind, Ms Russell writes timely and relevant articles, not only from legal and ethical standpoints, but also from a common sense perspective. Much of what she writes is generalizable. In addition, internet searches for terms such as copyright law for the jurisdiction of publication (e.g., Canada, Australia, &c.), research ethics, plagiarism, intellectual property, ethical use of information, &c., offered online by credible sources, will provide much information germane to the subjects outlined on this page. Examples of supplementary credible sources include:
- the WIPO (Word Intellectual Property Organization) Copyright Treaty , and
- the Creative Commons, an international nonprofit organization. All references, tool, and guidelines created by the organization ©2019 have been published under licence CC BY 4.0 .
Postscript :
A blog article is under draft, reciting several instances discovered of plagiarism, theft of intellectual property, and unethical appropriation without attribution from the pages of Arborealis. These examples illustrate the need for setting terms and conditions for the responsible and ethical use of information as discussed on this page.
End notes :
Source citation for this page: Kilpatrick, Alison. “Copyright notice.” © Alison Kilpatrick 2020. Published to Arborealis, online at arborealis.ca/about/copyright-notice/, accessed [insert date].
All rights reserved. Alison Kilpatrick ©2020.
Updated 25th Dec. 2023.