Are you saying that you can copyright genealogical information? Can history be copyrighted? This is a serious question, because I don't know the law here.
It's not likely I will bring suit against the Mormons for doing this. First off, they have a lot more money; secondly, they have lawyers who can win every single time; thirdly, I actually support them in this effort.
In fact, I would be first in line to protest any law that allowed a copyright owner to trash someone's computer because he thought they'd violated his copyrights!
Hey, that's what we have the Second Amendment for anyway ~ to obtain redress of grievance when the government is on the side of tyranny.
I can answer that. YES. Why? Because "intellectual property" -- especially in such loose forms has copyright and patent have become is expansive. There is no check to it. A powerful holder of such an expansive grant to use of the Force of the State on his behalf -- which is what a copyriight is -- the right for Eisner, say, to call down the Federal Hounds of Hell on you, for viewing a pirate copy of "Steamboat Willy". Wait!
That's not enough of the analogy -- I beg you read on --
Walt Disney made "Steamboat Willy" in 1923. When made the limited duration of the copyright was then set in law as 14 years, with provision to request an extension at the end of that for another 14. Interpreted as a contract that grant would mean images others might produce or copy of Mickey Mouse returned as property of the owner of the physical item on which the image appeared in 1951.
Yet the Federal Government under sway of the forces of the near-nobility established by such "grants of title" by the State -- the legislature, the excutive and the judiciary, all three -- has magically transformed a "contract" between the government acting as agent of "We, the People" and the copyright grantee into something that can ONLY be construed to be a grant of a State Sovereign, and not an agent. That is NOBILITY.
"Steamboat Willy" and Mickey Mouse remain the sole NOBLE RIGHT of Lord Eisner and his Disney Corporation.
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And there is the GIST of it. By the ever expansive intrepretation of the copyright and patent clause, we have become Subjects of the State, and of the Nobles to whom the State choses to grant "intellectual property" to.
So YES, history can be and WILL be copyrighted. Such absolute power is not slack in finding its extremes.