[WikiEN-l] CAS Discourages Using SciFinder to Help Curate Wikipedia

[The Mangoe]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
Whether they're non-profit or not, CAS acts precisely as jealous
>  of its set of numbers as any other commercial database company.
>  The impression I get is that this *is* a significant nuisance for
>  chemists and other scientists.  Other entities (I can probably
>  find the details) have attempted to establish their own, freer
>  sets of unique identifiers for chemical compounds, precisely in
>  hopes of avoiding the cumbersome restrictions placed on the use
>  of CAS numbers.  But CAS has sued -- and I think successfully --
>  to discourage this, claiming either that they own the idea of a
>  single master database of unique identifiers for chemical
>  compounds, or that having a competing set of identifiers would
>  sow confusion.

The claim on the idea would fall under "patents", would it not?