It seems like fair use to me. If there was a long obit written by a loved-one though, that could be a copyright issue... what you described seems like general info
The only legal advice I can give you is, do not solicit legal advice on the internet.
..perhaps if you posted a link to the original at the end of your posting it would help. If the originating post explicitly states copy rights are in effect...
at least you have one guy who wont object
If we've come to the point that your question is cause for worry, then we're dead anyway.
What you can do is use whatever ‘sharing’ options that website offers such as an RSS feed. That way you will be using the method they have approved to share their stories which should offer you some sort of protection.
You can retype the information that would be publicly available on a death certificate.
Other information printed in another publication is probably held under their copyright.
Just don’t cut and paste..re-write it.
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
You can provide a link to this info on the other site vs. copying the data and this would not infringe upon any potential copyrights.