Copyright in chemical material on the WWW

[peter murray rust]

I hesitate to raise a very open-ended question on this list, but I'd be
grateful to know if anyone knows of WWW resources (or established
practices) relating to what is 'fair use' of specifically chemical
information on the WWW.
	[I'm writing in the context of preparing material for our virtual
course on Structure-Based Drug Design, so my primary orientation is
educational. Typical questions are the extent to which authors can
'quote' from the WWW, and whether students can copy material for inclusion
in submitted work.] 
	Firstly, it is universally agreed that there are no definite
answers to any copyright problems. The only sure answer is to get
permission from the copyright owner (if they can be identified, and if
they take the trouble to respond).  Otherwise decisions can only be made
in courts in a particularly country.  I have read through some of the many
links from: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ and
http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProprty/cprtindx.htm which are 
good places to start from.

Abstracting (very generally) from this, the factors weighing in favour of
'fair use' i.e. use without consulting the copyright owner are:
- educational, non-commercial use
- restricted distribution (e.g. for a particular course of students)
- it is a small part of the resource from which the material was copied
- the material is factual
- there is no essential loss of income to the author.
- attribution of source

For text-based material it is often possible for authors to summarise
parts of documents, but chemistry is a partially graphic subject where in
some cases graphics is the only way of transmitting chemical information.
An obvious example is the use of a chemical structure diagram, reaction
schemes, mechanisms of enzyme action, etc.

To avoid unstructured discussion on this list, I'd be particularly
interested in existing documents about chemical or biological copyright on
the WWW. One problem with most of the (freely published) documents about
copyright is that they are also copyrighted without any indication of
permitted use :-(

It would also be very useful if the current and future publishers of
chemical material on the WWW could give an indication of what they regard
as 'fair use' of their material. This could include some or all of:
- copying a small percentage
- use for non-commercial purposes
- any use so long as authorship is retained and copyright quoted in its
entirety, etc.
- mirroring 
This may (possibly) reduce the risk that the material is abused
unknowingly - it will probably not reduce deliberate misappropriation.

	P.


Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences
Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100
Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/


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