STOP THIEF! The Conclusion

Oh my gosh, if that isn't the cutest pirate! Photo courtesy of Jokeroo.com.

Apologize for the delay with this one, it was supposed to publish automatically and did not!

Throughout this series I think its clear I've struggled with the moral aspects of piracy, theft, and "sharing" in general. And I'm not the only one. As one of the posters in the book piracy forum made clear:

"When I find an author whose work I like and want to support, if I have obtained an item at no cost, how can we make it right financially? I wish there was a no questions asked type of place where we could pay authors. // Many of us struggle with our own moral issues in this type of activity, but some read so much it is too costly to keep up the pace"

I wish there was indeed! Sometimes an author or designer I go back and repurchase items from them, because you know what, I do like their stuff and I want to see them make more! For every me, though, there's probably ten that don't.

What I've determined is that there are multiple paths towards living in a pirate world:

1. "Suffer the little children". As Jesus once said, allow them. Let them come even if they are not desirable. As we can see from the authors, they've found ways of coping with them even if they don't like the behavior. As author JA Konrath put it "You CANNOT assume that a downloaded free book is a lost sale." Read the rest of his thoughts here. They are significantly enlightening!

I think this is the only approach that genealogists really have. What we can do, however, is use the tools and technology in front of us to manage the situation. Put a citation on that photo. Insert a unique element that can only be traced to you. But at the same time, I think opening up our permissions would be a good approach as well. Why are we obsessed with copyrighting photographs of tombstones that anyone can take? I understand the work involved in getting them - I do genealogy photography myself, but I really feel that I'm giving to the karma of the community when I allow folks to use them as they will.

2. Work with your customers to give them exclusives that they can't get anywhere else.

Cameron Jace, one of my favorite authors who are alive (yes, this is a category LOL) has a Facebook group, Tweets and works with his fans to get them exclusive access to his books before they hit the marketplace, we can talk with him and interact with him making the level of connections to the story much more interesting. Would I have read his other books if I hadn't been connected to him on Facebook? Probably not.

The other way of doing this is to continually incentivize your patrons with exclusives. Rabbiz Designs is a Thai designer of amigurumi who are wildly pirated. But by giving her exclusive buys incentives to keep buying, she gives her people a reason to come back. And because the levels of entry are significant, the designer gives them a secondary layer of encouragement to not pirate her designs, because they are hard to get and much easier to figure out if pirated.

Another way to do this is to position yourself as an active member of the community, so that your customers feel as if you, as the author, as the designer, etc. is a trusted friend. Julia Trice, owner of Mind of Winter Designs to me is a great example of this. Not only is she active in her own forum, she's also active in the Anthropologie Knits group on Ravelry, but also gives away advice to other designers in the design forums. Even though I don't know her personally, we've talked back and forth several times, and that's made me think hard about sharing her patterns with others...and others have said the same thing. There's a power in interaction that I don't think people realize!

3. Educate.

Teach them, my friends. So many folks don't realize what they are doing is piracy or theft. Explain to them how to build a house of citations. Give them simple ways to understand that they have to ask politely for things.

The key here is that the exchange can't be full of "You stole it! I'm telling Mom!!!!" type interchanges. And going to social media doesn't help either. Whining to your friends that the mean man stole your photo is not helping matters.

Sometimes Americans also forget that we live in a world that is governed by a hodgepodge of laws, cultural practices, and religious rules that vary from country to country and that what flies here as theft isn't necessarily theft in other countries. Our IP rules are some of the strictest in the world, but other countries don't worry about those same protections. Or that their cultural history is one of sharing and collecting, so that's what they do online. 

4. Defend.

Here's where it gets tricky. You could spend a million and one years on defense and it would never get you anywhere, because the amount of piracy out there is just amazing. And it spreads virally, to the point that some books and designs have been pirated millions of times. I understand why some folks retreat to their house of defense, cry, and take their designs and writings offline. The natural reaction is to be super frustrated, and let me tell you - I get that totally! But there are a few ways that you can defend that are the smart way, and some that are the not-so-smart way.
--1. Send a cease and desist to Google. This link for search results and this link for Google services. Overwhelmingly, the first place people go to find things is Google. They're not brand loyal, they're looking for where it is listed FREE. Cutting down on the number of people who can find a pirate site with your content is the biggest chunk of the battle. (There are people who actually use Bing and Yahoo too, you can use basically the same letter to address them to at this link.)
--2. Let's say most of these links go to a file share network of some kind. You can get some of them to remove the file from their website by sending a C&D to them, too. Here's some helpful ones:

Pinterest http://www.pinterest.com/about/copyright/dmca/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/208282075858952
Instagram http://help.instagram.com/454951664593304
DepositFiles: http://depositfiles.com/abuse_copyr.html
Rapidgator http://rapidgator.net/article/intellectPolicy
Rapidshare: https://rapidshare.com/help/dmca
RYU Share: http://ryushare.com/?op=page&tmpl=DMCA
Mediafire: https://www.mediafire.com/policy_violation/copyright.php

Key here is that you're looking for sites based in the US and EU that have intellectual property laws. They will respond much faster than other sites based in countries without such laws (I'm looking at you Sweden, Russia, China, Thailand, Ukraine, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.).
--3. For the most part, most people can stop with 1 and 2. But there are a few that might head to option 3. That's engage the pirater.

For the most part, the people who do this aren't your classic cartoon villain. They aren't out to steal your livelihood. They may not even have looked at your stuff before personally. They may not even realize that by borrowing the idea of the classic circle of crafting friends and using it on the international scale, they have jumped from friendly borrowing to intellectual property thievery.

So I'll start out by saying tread lightly here. Don't contact them when you're upset, angry, frustrated, hungry, tired, or in another language that you don't speak/write well. Context is extremely critical in an online environment, as its hard to tell tone. Talk to them as a bud. Tell them how you love that they love your pattern or work so much, but that you're hurt they're not directing them directly to you. Work in a conversation and explain your design principles and how you're a rocking single mom and doing this to pay for the kid's ice skating lessons (or maybe you're a dad writing down the family stories about dragons and castles you told your kids) (or maybe you're a struggling graduate student who needs the money for books).

My point by this? By engaging them civilly, you're starting up a connection with them. They may not take the post down. But they will think twice about doing it again, because you're now a friend (in the online sense of the word). You're not the big, bad company trying to take them down in a big conspiracy to make fun of, you're a nice person trying to do right. Will this approach work? Sometimes. More often than not, it won't. But for folks who have an audience in the size of dozens or hundreds, not thousands or millions, every person converted to your cause helps - and it might convert the people who see the pirates site into potential customers, because they can see how you acted with class. The thing about this is that it takes time. A lot of time. More time than most people who run a small business have (and that includes you designers and authors too!).

So there's a tradeoff - do you spend the time fighting or do you spend your time on positive pursuits like marketing to potential leads? My answer would be to spend your time marketing. Make your brand your own, and own it like no one else.

I hope you have learned something by reading my thoughts into an exploration of piracy. I don't know if its helpful to any of you to understand this, but it helped me understand my moral quandries with this world. Will I pirate in the future? On occasion, sure, it might happen when I find something really rare. Regularly? Probably not. 

STOP THIEF Part 3 - Trying to be a book pirate

Yep, I understand. Worst pirate ever! LOL (Meme courtesy of Cheezburger.com)

This last part of the series I've delayed because I have, well, been the worst pirate! I tried to find some books that I didn't already own that I would actually read and couldn't come up with any. It's hard when you're a voracious reader in just about every category. I was getting desperate and even turned to the forums to try and find something. Pirate Bay and others really only carry the "usual", the "popular" etc. Dude, if you want to try and find any John Grisham novel ever written...just go torrent. 

But I was seeking the unusual. German translation of a young adult novel? Finally! None of the books really ended up being anything worth noting, but I did actually find one. Through this forum where I found my rare book I came upon a curious post by author JA Konrath. For those of you who haven't heard of him, he writes uber-cool thrillers about cops as well as short stories and a neat blog. Konrath as much as admitted in the post that file sharing is another way to get media out there in a marketplace that sometimes just isn't the right fit for a world audience.

"In some cases, file sharing is the only way to get media that is rare or out of print. It is astonishing how much stuff has never been released digitally. Stuff I'd gladly pay for, but no one will take my money because no one is selling it, except maybe on eBay for ridiculous amounts."***

I know *exactly* what he is talking about here. Books and stories and poetry I would give my eyeteeth to buy, but cannot, because of "out of print" rules or people greedily trying to sell their items for as much as possible (I mean, really. Some folks listed Alice Starmore books before her reprint deal at over $1,000 on eBay and Amazon. Come on! They weren't even signed. But I digress). 

What the post really made me think about was what several of the people later said, in thread:

"I have found some really awsome authors in genres I wouldnt normally buy, and will now be purchasing their work on a going forward basis."***

"I admit, I would not have bought your other books, unless I found one of your other books first online."***

What it said to me was, we've got some real book lovers here, but the costs of buying a book on a tight budget didn't make it especially good to make an investment in a new author. 

What surprised me though, is that all of the authors were saying the same thing!

"I've always viewed "pirating" in the same arena as a library...and every library I've ever visited allows you to take a book/CD/movie home and enjoy it for free. "***

Why is it that these authors have this figured out? Why are they so into the idea that they get it? Piracy happens. They move on. What I found so refreshing about studying this issue is that there are at least five authors here who were actively saying they were okay with pirating but asked that people start leaving reviews on major websites like Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, etc. so that their book doesn't languish under the weight of, well, as one author put it "dinosaur porn".

Could this be the secret? That by using the power of social interaction, they can use the sunk costs of the pirated materials to increase their revenue...almost like marketing? I find this idea fascinating. At the same time, ebook publishers have also been moving away from rights management: 

"“After discussing it with authors and readers, it became pretty clear that DRM was not much of a problem for the sophisticated pirate, but it was, however, a meaningful problem and an annoyance to many of our readers,” Doherty told the audience. “So, we went all in.”" See the article at http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/62577-bea-2014-why-drm-is-the-problem.html for more details.

The quote above, from Tor Books founder Tom Doherty, makes sense. He's thinking about his customers, not the pirates. 

In that light, I found many authors with the same experiences. Many give away their books now as part of a marketing effort, helping the authors get their books up the Amazon, Goodreads, and Smashwords lists, leading to additional paying customers. They have found that working with the customer, instead of solely focusing on the pirates and the bad behavior and made their situation work. 

 I'm going to end this series tomorrow with the last section - ideas for how to handle piracy across these areas, in an attempt to learn from the experiences of the people involved in book piracy, genealogy piracy, and crafting piracy. Stay tuned!

***I really would like to cite these quotes, but I'd rather not point y'all to a pirate site. If you're enterprising, you'll be able to find it on your own using the quotes listed.

STOP THIEF Part 2 - Trying to become a genealogy pirate

Shamus, whose father was a tree, from Family Guy. (courtesy of the Family Guy art archives)

With apologies to Shamus, above, most of us don't think about piracy and theft much when we're doing genealogy. In fact, I hadn't even thought it possible to be a pirate or a thief when doing genealogy unless I like, you know, stole something from an archives or something.

But little did I know that when I joined large Facebook genealogy groups such as RAOGK that the word thief, stole, and took would be some of the most common words used on the site, mostly in relation to Ancestry.com and Find-a-Grave. This presented a problem for me, because I hadn't really thought about the site in that way, but then I realized they were talking about using items without permission, regardless of copyright and attribution, so its kinda like piracy, just in the nicer guise.

And I do understand the trouble with Ancestry. There are SO many layers of complication to the story with the member trees there. Bugs. Free vs. paid accounts. No attributions. Beginners vs. experienced genealogists. Group ownership of other websites, like Find-a-Grave. Those accursed shaky leaves, aka "hints".

So what I decided to do was to try and make a tree and just take everything I could find. So I did. I learned about the Pollock family, in an attempt to figure out why Jay Pollock was buried on the same stone as my Webber family with no apparent connection. [Side note: I did eventually figure this out with the help of the tree and the wonderful volunteers at Ravelry]

I added every document, every photo, every connection. I downloaded every census, and put it into the tree without a care in the world. And then I waited. Expecting that there would be angry cries, accusations of thievery and calls to burn the heathen!

Like this scene from Frankenstein (1931). Because, you know, all good angry mob scenes are in black and white, at night, and consist of walking halfway around town first.

But nothing happened. No angry cries, no threats, nothing. I can only surmise that there are five problems:

1. This family just isn't that popular. Or maybe the descendants have died out. They have become the property of the commons, without anyone taking ownership of them. (entirely possible).
2. The contributors of the documents willingly gave them out for free use on the internet (entirely possible).
3. Maybe, in an age where it is super easy to connect documents to our trees, that people have given up and just assumed it would happen. (entirely possible)
4. They couldn't contact me through Ancestry (although my email is listed in my profile just in case). (again, entirely possible).
5. Or maybe, our proof centered genealogy culture makes thievery a bit of an inevitability. (see below).

#1-4 are entirely possible. Practically a prediction, in fact. #5 though, was the one that made me think more. In discussing this case with several genealogy buddies, it came out that whenever we want to do something in genealogy, we prove it. We make copies of original documents. We take photos. We scan. We post. We do all this in an attempt to prove that we have the "real case" on our ancestor. We want to prove that our knowledge is the "right" knowledge. We even have people trying their darndest to make genealogy snobbery a thing with people claiming snobbily that they only research "the right way, in person".

Is our compulsion to collect the proofs what has encouraged a system of lazy, inadvertent theft? Perhaps. I can see where it would lead to an idea that only we can "own" our ancestors and that the other folks who develop these contents are mere caretakers. But perhaps it is because we do not understand the nature of the cloud system, and we do not trust that sites will be around to forever provide archives of our documents and photos. If that's the case, what do we do then?

Stay tuned for part 3 - learning about book piracy, and part 4 - solutions.

STOP THIEF Part 1 - Confessions of the Reluctant Pattern Pirate

The Pride of Baltimore, a privateer ship similar to the Cygnet, ship of the reluctant pirate Charles Swan courtesy of the Wikipedia Commons.

This might get a little long, but I promise, the story is worth it. Please note, before I start here - my accounts are gone. I closed them down. I deleted any content I saw might be connected to the sites mentioned. I removed anything I shared. And I tried my best to remove any comments I had made. I've never uploaded anything that was remotely within copyright, or intellectually owned by anyone else. I've reached the end of my investigation, so that really meant I had no business interacting on these sites anymore.

Nearly 10 years ago, someone posted a message to a Yahoo group that no longer exists saying that they found this cool new site with tons of knitting and crocheting content. Excitedly, my friends and I visited the site and discovered that it had a lot of cool books and other foreign patterns on it that we had never seen before, and it blew our minds with the horizons that had already been passed in Spanish, Russian, and Japanese knitting. 

Then I started to see our English designs go up on there. Not just the big corporate ones, but small designers who were just starting out, designers that who were the beginning of the vibrant marketplace at Ravelry. And I was horrified. 

What kind of person would do that? And then I realized - my friends, chatting back and forth about this resource, were in effect, becoming part of this virtual stitching circle that was quite honestly, clearly violating international copyright law. 

It took a little convincing (well...maybe a lot) but we STOPPED. We deleted everything. And we started reporting the places on the site that violated the copyright of the people we knew. And then we started reporting the corporate violations to the companies, like Rowan, Alan Dart, Martingale Press, Crochet Today, Interweave, Vogue, etc. 

And we saw progress. The violators were punished, while leaving the rest of us alone to chat about the aftermath, and our own stitching. And so things were quiet. Then another site cropped up. So we collectively reported it. And it went down. Then we learned about this new thing called torrents. So we started quietly policing those too, getting people to take torrents down and manipulating the seeding process to make the torrents unusable. 

But the sites keep coming. And increasingly, they are in Russia and China, where it is increasingly hard to defend intellectual property. So we started talking to copyright lawyers and intellectual property lawyers. Their work got a few more sites down.  

But of course, another site came up. So this time, filled with indignation, I joined. All these designers' generosity was being repaid by these jerks who were charging for their designs! And the charged money for the privilege! So I decided to study the system, and see how it worked. Basically, the design of this site and clones is that you earn a currency (mostly called coins) and you earn status to move up in rank. The sites are in multiple language, with the one pictured above requiring participation in English with members from all over the world.

Without rank, you can't do much. You can look at a limited amount of items, and you can participate in text messaging and games and chats, so the site automatically encourages people to "share" patterns with others in order to earn more currency and more status. As long as you don't share something duplicated elsewhere on the site, your work will get approved. Usually it requires minimum work to upload it, naming the designer, the type of file, the language and an image of the pattern. 

So the more currency you earn and the more rank you have, the more you can download and see on the site (as certain things are limited to folks of a certain rank). 

You can see the problem in this - basically, it encourages people to upload whatever they have, no matter if it is paid, free, theirs, not theirs - inadvertent theft still is theft. And its all free to those who want to spend the hours.

At first, I couldn't get the users to engage. It was impossible to stand out as a beginner. After a bit I arrived at the solution.

I could pirate my own work.

So I did. And that got me enough points to be able to move throughout the forums. At first, I tried pointing out that the patterns are free elsewhere. I mean, why spend money to get the currency for the site when the items were free elsewhere? It didn't make sense in my head.

And I got friends to help me. One by one, they were banned by their IP address, making them unable to access the website in question. But somehow my account endured. So I kept posting. Finally people started warming up and explained that they could earn the currency needed without worrying about buying currency. And then they said they were smart enough to go get the items from the site they were free from, because they were members there too.

Which got me thinking: who are these people? I had this stereotypical vision of the angry Chinese hacker, stealing from our American designers and posting them for free for their people. It made me sad and ashamed that I stereotyped people in this way. :-(

So I kept at engaging them. When one site had a bit of a meltdown, another site was born, and folks invited me there. So I went with them. And watched the site grow as people shared multitudes of craft instructions ranging from cross stitch patterns, knitting patterns, crocheting patterns, and fifteen other crafts. 

The benefit of this, of course, was that I could get to know these folks from the very beginning. I could learn the inner workings of the folks at the beginning of the setup of the site. So I started pirating far vintage patterns, very far out of copyright, intellectual property long since forgotten and not owned by anyone currently (I intend to write a blog series in the future, talking about this investigation process!), trying to make me a high ranking member of the site. And I succeeded. 

The higher my rank got, the more trusting people became. 

I learned that fully half of the people on the site were Americans. The rest were folks around the world, with issues getting access to crafting patterns, trying to practice their English with us. Most of them were older, many on a fixed income doing their crafts in retirement. They view the site as an extension of their stitching circle. At least half are not computer savvy but liked networking with other stitchers. They found the site through Google or by word of mouth. They didn't think about aspects of the site that I thought about, like ethics of depriving designers of web traffic, or if what they were doing was theft. After all, it was just exchanging between friends, right?

Except it wasn't. The site we all came from? It hit 65,000 members. The "new" site? Hit 2,000 members. Can one really legitimately argue 2,000 people are your best friends? 

But I just kept talking to them, trying to understand the actions, because it didn't make sense to me. Then it started to roll in. Multiple people said they were just passing along something their other friend sent them. That friend got it from another friend. At this point, they felt there was little harm in sharing something that had been shared eighty billion times before. They viewed it as building karma in the community, not stealing.

The other curious thing that came about on the site was that these people were still BUYING things. many of them stating they had craft budgets of $15-20 a month to spend on patterns and other materials, and mentioned that the site increased their pattern buying, because they became a fan of this designer or that designer because they had tried out a pattern on the site. This didn't jive with what else I learned, because it didn't make sense - if you're going to buy patterns, then why bother with this crazy site and getting more patterns that you didn't need? 

Then I came upon a post by John Brownlee over at the Cult of Mac blog. And now I get it.

These folks don't appreciate the patterns that they have. Brownlee's quote here says it best: "It’s clear to me, in retrospect, that my piracy was mostly mere collecting, and like the most fetishistic of collectors, it was conducted with mindless voracity".

These folks aren't really dedicated stitches, stitching hundreds of pieces a year. They're mindlessly collecting things because they can. They know artists like Laura Aylor, Heaven and Earth Designs, Lydia Tresselt, and more are amazing, and therefore want to "admire" their work by collecting it. 

One of the funniest episodes I've ever seen that has an amazing allegory about collecting and hoarding, check out the episode from Season 4 of South Park "Trapper Keeper" (still shot above courtesy of South Park Studios).

Except they aren't really admiring or collecting, they're hoarding. They have the digital equivalent of a house on Hoarders, filled with patterns and sharing more patterns, making this monster up that they will never, ever make, never making those patterns blossom into real things. The intangible, always to stay intangible, never moving forward.

Are designers losing money due to piracy? Yes. Are they losing opportunity to sell to these folks? No. It's an important distinction. Should designers be chasing these people? Well...defending your intellectual property is important, but the amount of time and money involved in doing so can make such actions cost prohibitive. And considering that these people don't represent future opportunity, because they'll never make your pattern and convert to a paying customer...it might not be worth it. 

Stay tuned for part 2 - trying to be a genealogy pirate, part 3 - learning about book piracy, and part 4- what can be done about pattern, book, and genealogy piracy.

STOP, THIEF!

(Courtesy of Pixabay.com)

I start this blog post with a little trepidation. It seems all too common today to accuse people of being thieves, stealing with abandon things that are intangible, such as music, movies, patterns, photos, and data. The person is dismissed with a word, and their word is never to be trusted again. In some cases, I've seen designers so vilified by an accidental similarity that they disappear from social media, Ravelry, and other sites, never to be seen from again. In the genealogy world, angry folks spread the word about a supposed thief without any supplemental information (excepting Gustave Anjou and the Horn papers, proven frauds/forgeries), and the person is written off.

I guess this is what prompted me to ask the question - what exactly makes a person decide to take something? What makes them interested in pirating sites? Why do they do what they do, whether it be grabbing a photo without attribution, or reading a free copy of a book?

So back to that trepidation - in order to understand the people in front of me, I had to join the masses. Yes, I had to masquerade as a pirate. No eye patches, but a digital identity that could not be traced back to me somehow. Which brought up a problem - how does one exactly become a pirate without actually being a pirate?

The answer is twofold: one, share my own work, and two, share things that are out of copyright, out of license, so far out that there was no question. So for example, sharing leaflets from the late 1800s. Sharing from companies that went out of business more than 70 years ago and didn't sell their copyrights and licenses. This actually entailed a lot of work, to make sure that what I was sharing did not violate these tenets. And to share the bare minimum in order to engage the audience at the appropriate level about topics so that I could get to know them.

As I go through this series, I will share my observations from actually trying to be a thief/pirate, and what I learned about the people who are actively sharing materials without observation to copyright, trademark, or license. 

3 mistakes to help rookie genealogists to fix (and avoid heartache later)

With the exception of Homer here (courtesy of the Simpsons art archive), most of us have to live with our rookie mistakes whether at work, at home, in knitting, or in genealogy. I was having a long email conversation with a friend over the weekend, and it occurred to me that others might benefit from the same conversation.

Her question (used with permission, thanks Helen!) All I did was correct her spelling to make it easier to read:

How does one teach a beginner the basics of how not to screw up without boring them to tears, scaring them off the hobby, or driving them into the arms of Ancestry.com and their commercial proclaiming them the loving guide to their families' genealogy?

My answer? Great question! Here are three foolproof techniques to use with beginners to capitalize on their excitement in genealogy but give them necessary tools to help them later on so these rookie mistakes don't haunt them for the rest of their genealogy life, in the context of the usual conversation I have with people.

The conversation starts: Answer their immediate question. Usually its "how do I read this?" or something of the ilk. Gain their trust. Then ask them how they know its their person. Usually this provokes a conversation about how they got their information.

Mistake 1 - Lack of documentation - Fix. Tell them to write down how they got there and save it with their person. It doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't even need to be paragraphs. Even a bulleted list can save them years of work later. The idea is that they start to document their work, so they realize later what they did and can save hours of re-finding effort. Later on, these documents can serve as the start of their research logs and help them in future research.

They're intrigued, and the conversation continues. If they complain about common family names, ask them if they have made a family chart. This is easy with most family tree programs and can be created. If you can, help them print it out, put it in the cover of their binder, put it on the wall, or even make it into a picture to use as the background on their computer desktop.

Mistake 2 - Mixing up generations with the same names - Fix. Getting that family chart is still the best way to keep different members of the family straight, especially when you get into the generations of the Daniels, Joshuas, Jacobs, and Matthews, where all names are Biblically based and repeat each generation. Sometimes the things that they told us to do at the beginning in 1980 are still current and valid techniques!

Basic family charts are the one thing that I still recommend printing, not only because they are pretty :-) but because they can help out in so many situations. "When was grandpa's birthday?" "What was Bill's father's name again?" "Which Daniel Graves are you talking about?" etc.

Moving beyond the basics but not quite to intermediate. At this point, people normally start telling me how they ran out of information to find online and that they're looking for more. If they get to this point, that's great! That means they are out of what I call the "beginner identity" and are starting to look for more. Start talking to them about the great events coming up in the area, or the neat new library.

Mistake 3 - Realizing Ancestry may not have the entire guide to their family history - Fix. For the love of all that is holy, do not utter the words "Oh, you can't find everything online" and start ranting about inaccuracies in family trees online. The beginner is just starting to learn and move beyond this, and you've just dismissed all their work.

What you want to do is get them excited about the things that are out there offline. Pictures! Documents! Newspapers! There's all kinds of fun in reading about their ancestor, and they can find them at libraries, document centers, etc. Genealogy is a hobby, not a lifestyle for the majority of folks, and you want to keep the message on the positive, motivating things that got yourself involved in the conversation.

Conclusion - I know this seems simple. But over and over, I've had the same conversation with people and seen the same mistakes made every time. I often stop people at meetings and at the library and say "Hey, I overheard you say ..." and launch into this after they've had someone berate them for not keeping their sources or using online sources. The relief that they feel and the thanks they have for someone helping them (but at the same time, giving them some tools to launch them into the genealogy techniques) is well worth the effort to overcome and actually talk to them.