The Irish unit, Ancestry Ireland, wanted access to records spanning the 12th to 16th centuries, including prison and census records, wills and valuation rolls.<\/p>\n
Ancestry.com says it generates revenue of about $1bn (\u20ac850m) a year.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the Irish unit generated revenue of $222m and a pre-tax \u00adprofit of $62.8m.<\/p>\n
It received a dividend of $905.5m from a related company that year, and saw its administrative costs soar to $1.03bn from $306.5m. That surge in expenses was due to increased royalty payments made to its parent firm.<\/p>\n
The Irish division told a tribunal in Scotland that it has been trying, to no avail, for the last 20 years to sign a commercial deal with National Records of Scotland (NRS) for access to the records, which span a massive 80 \u00adterabytes of data.<\/p>\n
\nAncestry.com said it holds 60 billion records online<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Over the last couple of decades, the NRS has been digitising its records with assistance from the Genealogical Society of Utah.<\/p>\n
Ancestry.com said that it holds 60 billion records online and that it has more than 25 million people registered in what it describes as the world\u2019s largest consumer DNA network.<\/p>\n
In 2022, Ancestry wrote to NRS requesting that it be permitted to reuse the data it sought on a worldwide, royalty-\u00adfree and perpetual basis so that it could be commercially exploited.<\/p>\n
Later that year, NRS refused the request. In doing so, Ancestry complained that NRS had failed to comply with legislation called the Re-Use of Public Sector Information (RPSI) regulations.<\/p>\n
NRS made a number of arguments, including that Ancestry\u2019s proposed reuse of the information was not \u201creuse\u201d of the information within the meaning of regulations.<\/p>\n
Ancestry then complained to the Information Commissioner in Scotland, and the NRS stood by its decision not to accede to Ancestry\u2019s request.<\/p>\n
The commissioner ultimately agreed with the decision, which was then appealed to a tribunal, claiming the NRS decision was unlawful. But the tribunal has now largely sided with NRS.<\/p>\n
\u201cNRS\u2019s exercise of its discretion to refuse Ancestry\u2019s request is not in breach of any requirement of RPSI,\u201d it said in a ruling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Irish unit, Ancestry Ireland, wanted access to records spanning the 12th to 16th centuries, including prison and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,18,19,17,24512],"class_list":{"0":"post-66271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-john-mulligan"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}