copyright ? display of crystal structures from atomiccoordinates

[Steve Ellison]

>>> "Rzepa, Henry" <h.rzepa at ic.ac.uk> wrote at 29/06/2000 09:14:56 >>>
>Whilst no lawyer, I am certain that  atomic coordinates are pure data
>and not subject to copyright. For example,  no-one would claim that 
>a melting point is copyright.

As an employee in a recently privatised government lab with a new intellectual property awareness, I've found otherwise.

In most science, Henry's view won;t do you much harm, but in a commercial world it could get your pants sued off. There is no such concept as 'pure data' - there is only a representation of that data, and in general, copyright exists automatically in a representation, irrespective of whether it's got a copyright notice on it. This applies everywhere; remember that legend "reproduced from <reference x> by kind permission of <owner>"? The original - pure data or not - was copyright. And to quote or reproduce it, you must (formally) have asked the copyright owner, usually the publisher.

So, rule of thumb: All published material is copyright and you need the copyright owner's permission to reproduce it in any form (including electronically). That applies to a published melting point as much as to the mona lisa.

The most important exception affecting ChemWeb is that the copyright in a heck of a lot of resources out there is owned by a university or government grant-awarding body which takes the philanthropic view that the data is acquired under the condition that it be made freely available for research purposes, or even that it will not be subject to copyright restrictions (as in the US under freedom of information laws). The upshot is that most people will be more than happy for you to quote their published results with a citation, though if it's a lot of data, they will be much happier if you ask first. The discussion between Henry and the CC database is typical of that view. 
The other exception is where you acquire or use a publication with explicit permission to reproduce parts; that's usually in the copyright notice on a book or in software.
A final exception: copyright usually has a limited life. Typically in the UK fifty years after the author's death, the copyright expires, though I think additional measures can be taken to extend that. However, material out of copyright is genuinely public domain and anybody's game, and that would probably apply to published statements of well-established fact (like the approximate melting point of water). 

In short, you can usually get away with modest extracts from scientific publications, but it's because of general custom and practice between scientists (who generally don't get offended by cited extracts, so don't sue you), coupled with explicit permission if necessary. It is never, ever a 'right' while something is in copyright, and published material is always copyright by default.




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