Worst possible outcome

[David Nicoll]

Steve,

   Well it’s a business model, it costs money to buy rent scanners, transcribe etc. This number can be calculated. Hence a cost per certificate, they also provide a fantastic rescan / support desk. Usually same day I find for poor images, I don’t see Ancestry doing that.
   If they offered subscriptions they would have to pitch it at a price point that might put people off, especially if they only have a few ancestors from Scotland. Currently all indexing searches are free, Ancestry seem to add remove features costs at a whim.
   Currently if I bought an image from SP I can see it again for free, all held on their servers 25 years after I first looked. Indeed as long as the account is live, you can see the records.
   They have now also added bulk download of viewed certificates, so you don’t have to do it one at a time.
   Have you suggested subscription or other option to them, they seem to be responsive to suggestions.
  As I said before if you have an Ancestry or FindMyPast subscription you can be 95% certain you have the right person.
  With Ancestry I am paying for thousands of records I am completely uninterested in, every year, so you win some, you lose some.
  Personally I prefer the SP approach, and going back to the original point, I dislike SP being taken to court by a company owned by a hedge fund.

PS since you are paying for a page, not an entry, you quite often get results for free as well!

[Jon_ni]

The BBC article I read

The BBC article https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy50gn5353zo is rather brief
Whodoyouthinkyou are gives a better idea https://whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/ancestry-nrs-records

Ancestry are after everything digital images and associated transcripts of census, wills and civil records and want free reign to use any way they wish under Open Government Licence - on a “royalty-free” basis. They argue that as FamilySearch have [microfilm] data then they are being discriminated against. They were & are open to discussing a licencing agreement and payment but NRS sees it as opening the floodgates to requests/demands from other Companies for the same images and metadata transcript and having ramifications on their ability to perform their public functions and on future work.

One wonders if Ancestry were also testing the water as if ultimately successful then they might consider further requests and challenges with other UK bodies and County Archives. Similar vital BMD images and indexes in their home country have greater public access restrictions and costs. They seem content to let Reclaim the Records chase those from State Archives via FOI, put online free, and then copy and put behind a paywall.

NRS is funded by the Scottish Government and by the income generated from ScotlandsPeople, the latter intended to be reinvested in the delivery of public services. The fees they charge approved by the Scottish Parliament.

Ancestry used The General Regulatory Chamber, a First-tier Tribunal to appeal against the Information Commissioner's Office and NRS' rejection of their data request. The Tribumal has ruled in Ancestry's favour on one aspect but against in several.

The full arguments, evaluations and decisions can be read via the National Archives
https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukftt/grc/2025/1088
Some excerpts are below but others might pick other bits.

Ancestry’s "Mr Atkinson accepted that the Request is for a valuable resource, unique to NRS, providing significant revenue to NRS, so that Ancestry might exploit it commercially"

"The effect of Ancestry’s submission is to deny an archive its threshold discretion and to make permission to re-use mandatory,"

268. In reality, Ancestry is asking us [the Tribunal] to examine and determine the limits of reasonableness in the exercise by a public sector body of a discretion which, if exercised so as to permit the requested re-use, would, as NRS would have it, mean it having to divest itself of, or at least potentially significantly diminish in its hands the value of, a unique asset which is currently fundamental to the performance of the public sector body’s public task, and to expose itself to additional, and potentially very substantial, ongoing costs, at an ultimate cost to the public purse.
269. It seems to us that that significantly exceeds the bounds of what the Commissioner and the Tribunal are set up to do under FOIA as modified for the purposes of RPSI. [Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations]

Decision: The Appeal is Allowed in part and Dismissed in part.
278. The Tribunal finds that the Request was a request for re-use within the meaning of RPSI. To that extent, the Decision Notice is not in accordance with the law, and to that extent the Appeal must be allowed.
279. The Tribunal finds that NRS’s exercise of its discretion to refuse the Request was not in breach of any requirement of RPSI. To that extent the Decision Notice is in accordance with the law, and the Appeal must be dismissed.

[Archivos]

...
I don't want free access, I want affordable access for my needs. As far as I can see the only way to achieve that is a subscription model of access, or perhaps bulk pricing on a sliding scale.

To give an example of Other Church records, about 15 years ago I had reason to want to access Nicolson Square Methodist Church records and was told they were not microfilmed and were held off-site. I would have to preorder the volumes I wanted and spend some days in Edinburgh reading them. At that point I gave up. As far as I can see they are still not filmed and are certainly not online and what is worse there is no evidence, like a filming and release schedule, that they ever will be. Equivalent records in England were filmed in the 1950's and are available through multiple subscription sources.

I don't really want to get into specific records but I would like to think that these records were being filmed on a well considered schedule and that they would one day appear online if only to stop them being lost to an unfortunate fire or dropping to bits through age.

This is the crux, what affordable means to different people. I don't have a subscription to Ancestry, as I don't use it enough. I don't mind the credit system on Scotland's People as a result, as it allows me to dip in and out, find information from the free indexes, look at some church records for free, and then decide if I want to part with any money.

Ordering records to look at which are held offsite is really common, and while the issue of access when not in the same country or can't get to where they are held is the same as it ever was, it does seem more frustrating now as there is other information online. A subscription service for Scotland's People isn't going to solve this though.

And thanks to Jon_ni for the fuller explanation of the tribunal outcome, much appreciated!