copyright and watermark

[Rzepa, Henry]

>Note that this might not even be intentional.  Suppose you synthesized
>Engelanol and reported its synthesis with a melting point of 87.9 degrees.
>Unfortunately, sometime between your lab and the printing press, a pair of
>digits get swapped and the published value ends up being 78.9 degrees.
>Given that the real melting point *isn't* anything close to 78.9 degrees,
>you (and the publisher, and any court of law for that matter) can be fairly
>confident that anyone who reports that value took it directly from your
>paper.


Somewhat off topic I know,  but when the original logarithmic tables
were published, the author is alleged to have inserted  "deliberate"
mistakes to be able to detect such copyright infringements. Closer
to the Internet, we have all noticed how  HTML authoring programs invariably
insert meta-data, which  I know is widely picked up by robot indexers.
Should you be as ill advised as to use an incorrectly licensed copy of
the authoring program, your actions can very easily be detected
in principle (if not, yet, in practice).

Taking this analogy one stage further,  XML is often described as a
"rolling stone", or lossless data medium.  If for example, one performs
some calculations on a molecule and expresses the output in  XML,
meta-information about the calculation could easily survive all the way
into any final publication, including eg the serial number of the program
that was used to perform the calculations.

One final foray into copyright (actually trademark, which is rather different).
In 1995,  we organised a  "Best of the Chemical Web 95" poster display, and
we wrote a covering page. One of the posters related to an interactive
display of protein structures, and it was described as a "protein exploratorium".
Five years lapsed, when I was "contacted" by a robot. It was apparently trawling
the web finding all occurances of the word "exploratorium", which the San Francisco
Exploratorium had trademarked for its museum, and asked me to remove the
word. As it happens, our lawyers here concluded that since it was in the
Oxford English dictionary, it was in common usage, and hence probably
our use was defensible.  Still, imagine a publisher trawling the web looking for
"78.9" and sending out legal letters to any web author it finds using that term
in relation to a melting point of a specific molecule
 (something XML would make easy).

>From which one might conclude that XML could either be a lawyers paradise,
or an author's nightmare!
-- 

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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