On Mar 9, 2008, at 1:04 AM, Brian wrote:
I suggest that we remove all CAS Registry Numbers from Wikipedia. They are
not Free. The ACS has been generous, *so far,* to politely say as much to us.
While I think that the stampy-feet nuclear option is not workable, I'm unconvinced this makes sense either. The enforceability of their copyright claim seems dubious, and I suspect that they're hard pressed, as a non-profit scholarly resource, to bitch about a non- profit scholarly resource quoting and referencing them. We should not fold and not reference an industry standard that is in wide and public use (i.e. used in patent applications) because of an overstepping copyright claim, which this certainly seems like it could be. (Does someone with actual lawyer-fu want to play here so that the armchair ones can stop?)
I think there's several things that need to happen for this to be productive.
1) We need to have somebody on our side assess the actual sanity of the copyright claim and of our use of the CAS information.
2) We need to actually talk to ACS/CAS and figure out what they want. There's likely a common sense compromise, like including the CAS numbers but not creating [[List of chemical compounds by CAS number]] or something that all sides would agree to.
3) Once we know our legal ground and have tried good, sane negotiation we can look at whether it is in our best interests (remembering that our best interests include "promoting the spread of knowledge and information" and thus that we may want to pull CAS numbers just to be nice if it really does endanger their ability to provide the service) to accomodate them, say "Oh just try it" to their lawyers, or what.
#3 is the most emotionally satisfying step, but 1 and 2 are kind of crucial prerequisites.
-Phil