copyright ? display of crystal structures from atomiccoordinates

[Rzepa, Henry]

> >>> "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.

We have to be careful because Copyright law is interpreted differently in the USA, in  Europe and
quite possibly in the far East. However I cannot bring myself to believe that if say
Chapman  and Hall wish to produce a Dictionary of Organic  Compounds in which they cite
a melting point, they have to seek permission from every original author of the article which cites
it. Does CAS do this when they quote a melting point? Do Beilstein do this for the
8 million compounds they cite, most of which were discovered in the last 50 years?
Has either organisation had its pants sued off?

If you are really correct that all"data" is automatically copyrighted (as opposed to a collection
of data, or a particular representation of data) then I would have to conclude that, as they say,
the  (copyright) law is an ass. 

In a different context, I note that British Telecom claim a patent on the "Hyperlink".  If
their case is proven, then we would all presumably need permission to use hyperlinks
(and indeed pay them royalties).
-- 

Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax)
Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7  2AY, UK. 
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/


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