On 10/03/2008, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 8:17 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
....
subscribe to SciFinder. There are nearly always specific provisions in the contract (not just for SciFinder, but for most databases and journals) that say who can get access to the data -- for instance, only the faculty, staff and students of a university. Obviously enough, the many glorious readers of Wikipedia are unlikely to fall into this faculty/staff/student classification.
Assuming this is true for most contracts they sign, then probably anyone systematically posting data from one of these systems is violating some provision of their contract. This doesn't have anything to do with copyright law per se, but it is a terms of use question.
Er, and I didn't actually look at the chemistry page to see what all folks were proposing to do. As Ec & David Goodman and others have said, CAS numbers are available from lots and lots of sources, so simply reprinting the things -- rather than trying to get a lot of them downloaded/validated through SciFinder -- doesn't seem too bad. I'd be curious how things like the CRC handbook get them, actually. Do they have to license their use from CAS?
-- phoebe
CAS numbers are available in independent, reliable, and usable resources other than SciFinder. Since the problem is with using SciFinder, and not the numbers themselves, this shouldn't affect our inclusion of CAS numbers in Wikipedia articles.
The following books are available, e.g.: *Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index 1996: 3 (1996 ed, Vol 3) *The ring index : a list of ring systems used in organic chemistry : a product of the Chemical Abstracts Service / by Austin M. Patterson, Leonard T. Capell, Donald F. Walker
There also seems to be a free look-up independent of ACS (http://webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/cas-ser.html). That said, this page is footed with "CAS registry numbers are copyrighted by the American Chemical Society. Redistribution rights for CAS registry numbers are reserved by the American Chemical Society. "CAS registry" is a registered trademark of the American Chemical society.".
The situation is confusing. If accessing these numbers using SciFinder is the problem (due to user agreements), there are alternative solutions. If claims that the numbers are copyrighted are legitimate, it may be a bigger problem. Aside from the issues of database and collative copyright, how copyrightable is an identifier of the form 74-82-8?