It seems that Ancestry.com and The Black Vault are in a dispute over The Black Vault‘s posting of the US military’s Project Blue Book documents, which Fold3 (an Ancestry.com subsidiary) digitized. Note that Fold3 does not require a subscription to access the documents they digitized, making them free on the Internet. The following excerpt is from Motherboard.Vice.Com:
For 15 years, UFO enthusiast John Greenewald has been collecting material related to the US military’s Project Blue Book investigation into unidentified flying objects and publishing it online through his website, The Black Vault.
But last week, he was forced to remove hundreds of thousands of declassified records due to a copyright claim from an unlikely source: the genealogy site Ancestry.com.
Ancestry.com’s subsidiary Fold3 has digitized the publicly available records, which are mostly things like letters describing UFO sightings (including drawings on occasion); the standard questionnaire the Air Force sent in response; and any conclusions the military could draw; and made them available on its website for browsing.
The company claimed that it therefore owned the digital reproductions of the records, and that Greenewald’s site was infringing on its copyright by publishing the materials, according to a statement from Greenewald…
