On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Steve Summit
<scs(a)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