A fellow was just complaining in a newsgroup that his GEDCOM was posted onto Ancestry by someone he shared it with. He didn' like that.

Well, GEDCOMs, even more than MP3s and jpegs, get spread around pretty quick these days. Only a few things, active things like viruses, for example, spread faster. They say "information wants to be free" and GEDCOMs demonstrate that very well.

But it does point out a serious conflict, one between the positive aspects of sharing (helpfulness, getting farther, less wasted effort) and the negative aspects (loss of credit for work, "theft" or plagiarism). We really are in need of ways to avoid the negative aspects so that more sharing of genealogy will be encourage.