Ancestry.com Ducks Lawsuit Over Yearbook Database

(CN) — A federal judge dismissed with prejudice claims that Ancestry.com used Californians’ yearbook pictures without permission.

The dismissal comes after a class of Californians sued the genealogy website in November 2020 claiming the site used their old yearbook photos and other information in ads without their permission. The class claimed the company maintains a massive database of yearbook pictures spanning from 1900 through 1999, but that consumers never got a say if they wanted to be included in Ancestry’s databanks.

“Ancestry did not ask the consent of the people whose personal information and photographs it profits from,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Nor has it offered them any compensation for the ongoing use of their names, photographs, likenesses, and identities.”

On top of amassing the yearbook collection without people's permission, the class said, Ancestry.com then used that database to solicit more users. The class said the company would use photos and other personal information in email and popup ads to potential customers to entice them to subscribe to its genealogy services, and even used photos of gravesites of deceased relatives to pull in more users.

The plaintiffs said this conduct was illegal and violated their privacy rights. They asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to stop Ancestry from using the database without additional safeguards for users’ personal information.

But after dismissing the suit this past March and sending the class back to the drawing board with their complaint, Beeler dismissed the suit against Ancestry once more Tuesday --- and this time for good.

In a 12-page order, the judge wrote that for a suit like this to succeed, those bringing it would have to show how Ancestry’s operation of its database resulted in actual injury to those whose pictures and information are stored within it.

Beeler found the first amended complaint failed to do so. The class cited emotional anguish as their primary injury and listed a series of similar past cases where such distress was deemed to be a valid injury. But Beeler found those cases had more than just emotional distress at their core.

“The cases recognizing mental anguish all involve other injury,” she wrote. “There is only mental anguish here, and alone, it is not injury in fact.”

The plaintiffs also failed to convince Beeler that Ancestry.com's use of their yearbook pictures was a theft of intellectual property. The plaintiffs had argued other court decisions have recognized likenesses as a form of intellectual property, and while Beeler acknowledged publicity rights can fall under this domain, the cases cited by the plaintiffs involved the likenesses of celebrities that had commercial value.

Beeler found the plaintiffs have not shown any proof of commercial value for their decades-old yearbook photos.

Finally, she found yearbook pictures are not private enough to warrant special protections. Ancestry came by the photos in part through donations from former students, and a reasonable person would assume that it was donated to the genealogy company to help with their services --- including for publication and marketing, Beeler found. Given the low expectation of privacy for photos like that, she found the company had a right to use them.

With nothing left to support the group’s claims, the judge ordered the final dismissal of the suit and closed the case.

Attorneys for the parties did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

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