David Gerard wrote:
On 08/03/2008, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com>
wrote:
...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.
...if they've actually sued people to try to maintain a monopoly on
the *idea* of numerical identifiers, I think they've just incurred
ours. Do you have details or pointers to such?
I couldn't remember, but after a bit of poking around, I found it
(of course) right within our own 'pedia. From [[PubChem]]:
The American Chemical Society tried to get the
U.S. Congress to restrict the operation of PubChem,
because they claim it competes with their Chemical
Abstracts Service.
That sentence is sourced to <http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/
news/acs_pubchem.html>, which says
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is calling on
Congress to "refocus" and curtail the NIH's PubChem, a
freely accessible database that connects chemical
information with biomedical research and clinical
information, organizing facts in numerous public
databases into a unified whole.
That page has several media citations from May-June 2005.
But I was wrong to say "sued", and I thought wrong when I said
"I think successfully", because PubChem seems to be going strong
(although I've found that PubChem numbers -- doubtless not
coincidentally -- are useless for unique identification).