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

[Geoffrey Plourde]

Maybe WMF should give them some competition. WikiChem anyone? 



----- Original Message ----
From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 9, 2008 1:04:38 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] CAS Discourages Using SciFinder to Help Curate Wikipedia

The Mangoe wrote:
> 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?
It would, perhaps as some kind of business process.  If that was the 
case then the normal 20 years of patent protection should have expired 
since the numbers were started in 1965.

Ec

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