Introduction :
This copyright notice forms part of the Terms and Conditions governing use of the website, Arborealis.
This copyright notice serves 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 published to this site.
Most people understand the common courtesy involved in asking for permission to use anything let alone intellectual property. However, a surprising number of people operate under the incorrect (and occasionally illegal) assumption that, “If it’s on the internet, it’s free;” and many find the subject confusing or even off-putting. Nevertheless, given the sheer volume of resources, time, and effort required to bring literary and research work to publication, without a paywall, the creator of such information has a reasonable expectation that, at minimum, common courtesy will prevail over questions of using information published to this site. Further, by visiting this site, you are accepting the conditions for responsible and ethical use of information as outlined in the following linked paragraphs:
- Copyright notice
- Recitation of the facts
- Creative Commons license
- Public Domain
- * Rules summarized *
- Caveat
- Appeal for common courtesy
- Legal disclaimer
- Recommended reading
- Postscript
- End notes
Copyright notice :
This website, Arborealis, is published in Canada. 🇨🇦 The site in its entirety, in substance and in form, is copyright to Alison Kilpatrick, and her heirs and representatives. 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 or a computer or in any other medium, without my written permission.
No part of this website may be used for commercial purposes, or appear in any website or any other publication or medium that has links to commercial interests, of any kind, whatsoever. This general rule applies to websites or any other medium with commercial interests, whether entrepreneurial, charitable, or educational in intent, and no matter how small the benefit, monetary or otherwise. Examples include, but are not limited to, websites featuring advertisements, requests for donations, pay-per-view, &c., unless specific written permission has been obtained from the editor of Arborealis.
Many users make the mistake of assuming that their home country has legal jurisdiction in copyright matters over information published to the internet. However, this is not the case, for example: U.S. copyright laws do not necessarily apply to literary, artistic, and other works produced in the United Kingdom, and vice-versa. Such works would carry 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 permission, please refer to the section, Citing your sources.
The following paragraphs outline specific exemptions from the copyright rule stated above.
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 consider acknowledging the source of this information by providing an appropriate reference.
Caveat:—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.
Creative Commons Licence :
Some pages on Arborealis will display a Creative Commons licence at the end of the article (not in the sidebar), as illustrated below. The licence is Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed. “This license 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.” (Creative Commons, accessed 2020-11-24.) Readers are encouraged to visit the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed link to learn more about this licence.
CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
: 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. When in doubt about the application of this 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 which has been prepared by Alison Kilpatrick, for Arborealis, may be designated by us as given over, or not, to the Public Domain.
This mark indicates works or materials that are no
longer restricted by copyright. “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, accessed 2020-11-27)
Readers are urged to visit this link to learn more about
Public Domain and how to use this mark.
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/least 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 a particular Creative Commons licence or to release her work into the Public Domain.
- Where Alison Kilpatrick has not specified a Creative Commons licence for a particular page or part thereof, assume that the page or part 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 that jurisdiction, and the policies and regulations developed from the laws thus enacted.
Appeal for common courtesy :
A great deal of public domain material is published, or in the works for publication, to Arborealis. I would ask users to consider the amount of work and other resources applied and purchased by me to bring this information to you, free of charge. For these reasons, please attribute any transcripts of out-of-copyright material to the transcriber, Alison Kilpatrick, Arborealis arborealis.ca. Attribution involves citing your sources. 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 or tertiary sources. In other words, Arborealis and the information presented therein does not constitute a set or series of primary sources. As a responsible genealogist, historian, or other visitor who subscribes to high research standards, you already know that you should corroborate my findings. The reader is responsible for observing the provisions of the Copyright notice and the rules for access to intellectual property presented on Arborealis.
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.)
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, 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 Wikipedia’s List of various countries’ copyright lengths, the WIPO (Word Intellectual Property Organization) Copyright Treaty, and the Creative Commons.
Postscript :
A blog article is under draft, reciting several instances discovered of plagiarism or intellectual property theft and unethical appropriation without attribution. 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 2020ff. Published online at Arborealis, arborealis.ca/about/copyright-notice/, accessed [Insert date of access].
Creative Commons (CC) is an international nonprofit organization. All references, tool, and guidelines created by the organization ©2019 and made available under licence CC BY 4.0.
Updated 22nd Nov. 2023.