Steve Summit wrote:
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.
If they were so confident about having copyrights there would be no need for them to ask congress to impose these restrictions.
Ec