Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Yes, you read the title of this blog correctly. In the not-so-humble opinion of a woman who e-mailed me several months ago, by putting a copyright notice on A Who’s Who of Tudor Women (a collection of over 2300 mini-biographies of women who lived in England during the period from 1485 to 1603), I have exploited a loophole in copyright law and “taken action to own their personal information, replace it with interesting but fictionalized stories, and denying [sic] that others share and consider these events when doing their own research.”

Huh?

Point of clarification: My Who’s Who is nonfiction, the result of more than forty years of research. I have also written novels that use some of the women included in the Who’s Who as characters, but those are completely separate projects.

Anyway, the first e-mail from this person seemed relatively sane, although I didn’t quite understand what she was getting at. She wrote that she had created a Wikipedia page about one particular Tudor woman and had included, with attribution, material paraphrased from that woman’s entry on my TudorWomen.com webpage. That’s always been allowable under copyright law. By the time of this correspondence, however, the website was no longer extant, since I had to take it down in order to publish a Kindle edition of the material. It was obvious my correspondent didn’t bother to look for the webpage before contacting me. I should have taken that as a warning sign. Then she wrote:

 When you copyright old stuff, you ruin for everyone else.  There are people on Wikipedia who simply delete any information also cited from you as a result.  Now, women of the Tudor period can’t have their stories told in factual sense, because you copyrighted that information and it’s hidden in a ‘wayback’ archive soon to be lost to time.

Again—huh?

original (much shorter) version of the book, published in 1984

I replied, explaining that the material was now part of a published book and that it was perfectly legal to paraphrase small sections of the whole. You’d think that would be the end of it, wouldn’t you? But no. She answered a little more than an hour after I sent my reply, telling me that the subject in question’s personal history has been made as your own personal property.  The Wikipedia won’t allow it on their site.  Now, people who want to learn about Tudor women will not be able to.  They can learn about the men, but not the women, because the men’s world is well-established.  But as any paraphrase of your material, due to its brevity in your paragraphs, will seem a copyright violation, the world is now denied knowing about them. In a separate paragraph she added: Only you can fix this.  The world is at your mercy.

 I really should have stopped right there, but the former teacher in me really wanted to educate her on copyright law. I wrote back to say, in part: “I suggest you research copyright law. Your information (and possibly Wikipedia’s) is incorrect. The personal history of a historical figure cannot be copyrighted, only the text of a book published on the subject. Further, one of my mini-biographies is only a tiny part of the entire book and quoting or paraphrasing it is definitely allowed under the law. End of discussion.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

She wrote back to say that copyright had granted me “exclusive ownership of the personal data of these Tudor women.” She then explained that Wikipedia is a large encyclopedia itself, many different contributors could quote or paraphrase portions of your book, which is a compilation of personal data without annotation or commentary (which as you say, is not copyrightable – however in this case, as a compilation it is).  So if all these different contributors quote you, it can become too much of a quotation and thus you could sue Wikipedia for plagiarism. That’s the loophole your copyright now exploits.

Uh-huh. So by that logic, no one can use material that’s in any encyclopedia, or the Dictionary of National Biography or the mini-bios of members of Parliament in the multi-volume History of Parliament—the last two sources being ones I used in compiling the Who’s Who.

She then helpfully included “the latest from Wikipedia” on the subject. “We need to have documentation that shows the copyright holders have given permission for the material to be copied to this website. Wikipedia has procedures in place for this purpose.”

At last the penny dropped. What Wikipedia wants is blanket permission to post content from my book. Any content. Even all content. That kind of defeats one of the purposes of publishing my book—to sell copies and make a couple of bucks. And here’s irony for you—the other reason I Indy published an e-book edition was to make the material readily available to researchers. My reasoning was that an e-book was likely to last longer than a webpage, and still be around after I’m no longer here.

I didn’t answer that last e-mail. It was obvious she wasn’t going to listen to common sense. But I was curious about her. Her e-mail address indicated she was a student at a New England college, but the only person there with her name was a PhD in the Department of Physics. Then I searched for her page at Wikipedia. It took a bit of effort to find, but what finally came up still included her paraphrase of my mini-bio.

Those discoveries relegated the correspondence to the “weird file.” If nothing else, its contents provide an endless supply of ideas for Maine Crime Writers blogs.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new omnibus e-book editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.