Can I take the fact that somebody has died and place on my website, from another website?

Can I take a death notice, which would be name, date of death and optionally general location, birth-date and place it on a website, I own, from another website?

I cant find anything written about this and was wondering what the smartest people in the world thought of it, legally and ethically.

I have done research on copyright in seeking to be lawful (in conscience toward God), and believe me copyright issues requires research, as there can be a lot of nuances and difference btwn countries.

The below article applies to your case i believe.

Feist v. Rural is an important United States Supreme Court case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural’s telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural’s phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.

It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that “information” is not copyrightable, O’Connor notes, but “collections” of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression.

Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O’Connor concludes, “the sine qua non of copyright is originality”. However, the standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel, rather it only needs to possess a “spark” or “minimal degree” of creativity to be protected by copyright.

In regard to collections of facts, O’Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data.

The court ruled that Rural’s directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law, and that no creative expression was involved. The fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural’s copyright claim was dismissed.

Implications

The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (that is, facts, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game, but cannot contain any of the “expressive” content added by the source author. That includes not only the author’s own comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover, his choice of which links to make among the bits of information, his order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like an alphabetical list), any evaluations he may have made about the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered “original creative work” of the author rather than mere facts.

For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are; see idea-expression divide and Publications International v Meredith Corp. (1996).[2] Therefore, you can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without infringing copyrights. But, if you rewrote every recipe from a particular cookbook, you might still be found to have infringed the author’s copyright in the choice of recipes and their “coordination” and “presentation”, even if you used different words; however, the West decisions below suggest that this is unlikely unless there is some significant creativity carried over from the original presentation.

Another case covering this area is Assessment Technologies v. Wiredata (2003),[7] in which the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a copyright holder in a compilation of public domain data cannot use that copyright to prevent others from using the underlying public domain data, but may only restrict the specific format of the compilation, if that format is itself sufficiently creative.

In the late 1990s, Congress attempted to pass laws which would protect collections of data,[8] but these measures failed.[9] By contrast, the European Union has a sui generis (specific to that type of work) intellectual property protection for collections of data.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

Thank God i could be of some help. Note also that the "fair use" clause allows for a relative small portion of copyrighted works to be included in works such as reviews, parody, news, and allows for use of such in derivative works also, in all cases provided sufficient attribution is given (outside commonly held knowledge, info), with the courts looking more favorably on free content.

This provides more details on that, but try to read the links also:

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia, so long as you do not follow the source too closely. (See our Copyright FAQ for more on how much reformulation may be necessary as well as the distinction between summary and abridgment.) However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.

My own advice to writers is that if you place something on the Internet, expect and allow it to be copied for later use and for free sharing, and if you object, then do not make it available. However, those who copy copyrighted works and do not give attribution, likewise significant amounts in derivative works, and or make money off it without permission, are the criminals.

Note that plagiarism is also a cloudy issue to some degree)

And yet i believe it is wrong for Christians to make things as sermons, songs, video, as part of Christian ministry, to criminalize free sharing of it so that they can get more income. Instead, free sharing should be allowed, as i state for my own works on the rather basic site of this small ministry, and in fact it should be encouraged if your priority is to get the word out.

It took much prayer for me to get permission to use just a few videos from CBN's Amazing Stories, which are a blessing, and thank God you can download some of them.

Likewise i found some other videos and songs that i could share (Calvary Chapel showing some real faith in this area), but this is rare.

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