Copyright status of official documents (naturalization in this case)

Question

Are naturalization cards (and birth/death certificates, cencus lists... for that matter) of the US found on FamilySearch copyrighted, or does this apply to those: https://library.osu.edu/blogs/copyright/2014/09/24/identifying-united-states-federal-government-documents-in-the-public-domain-2/

In other words, is it OK to download the image, upload it here on WikiTree and cite the source?

Answer 1

All U.S. government documents are in the public domain, so no prohibition on uploading to Wikitree.  Laws regarding state and local government documents are a mixed bag.  For most older documents, any initial copyright would have expired.  Anything that is copyrighted should have an explicit copyright claim.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_U.S._subnational_governments for additional info.

Answer 2

Kerry's answer is correct but the problem is you are confusing copyright with terms of use. The terms of use from familysearch.org are what would get you into legal problems. They state in that section that you can copy and use those documents for personal use but not for commercial use and WikiTree is legally a commercial site. If you download from familysearch then the terms of use comes into play and I do not think it would be a good idea because we have a good relationship with them right now.

Comments

FamilySearch does not and cannot restrict the use of public domain images obtained from them.  They explicitly acknowledged this in a previous G2G post when asked about posting a census image to Wikitree:  "The U.S. Census is not a copyrighted material.  As such, you can do and copy, print or whatever you wish with it.  It should matter not, where your copy came from."  The specific example was the U.S. census, but it applies to all public domain material.

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Kerry, I do not want to risk any further restrictions of their images, They are already cutting back on them being viewed so I would rather err on the side of caution and keep those still available to us than be strictly "legal" and lose even more.