In a message dated 3/8/2008 7:14:03 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, dg erard@gmail.com writes:
The claim is that "CAS numbers are copyright CAS/ACS who have the legal right to regulate their use - as above." >>
--------------------------------------------------------------------- You cannot copyright a fact. That a certain chemical compound has a certain number (or whatever this is), is a fact which cannot be copyright. Same as a person's birthdate, or the last ten mayors of New York.
Copyright covers your *artistic* work, not your factual work. Which is why full extracts of say, everyone who lived in Hoboken in 1880 aren't copyright as tabular results. It's only your artistic additions, such as annotations, which can be copyright. Not the raw extracts.
Will Johnson
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Will Johnson wrote:
You cannot copyright a fact. That a certain chemical compound has a certain number (or whatever this is), is a fact which cannot be copyright. Same as a person's birthdate, or the last ten mayors of New York.
Certain publishers have, however, claimed with various degrees of success that it should be possible to claim a "compilation copyright" on a database full of facts.
See, for example, [[United States copyright law#Compilations and the sweat of the brow doctrine]] and [[Copyright law of the United Kingdom#Databases]]. A web search on "sui generis copyright" is also instructive; one hit is our own article on the EU [[Directive on the legal protection of databases]]. In particular:
Sui generis right
Copyright protection is not available for databases which aim to be "complete", that is where the entries are selected by objective criteria: these are covered by sui generis database rights. While copyright protects the creativity of an author, database database rights specifically protect the "qualitatively and/or quantitatively substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents"...
The holder of database rights may prohibit the extraction and/or re-utilization of the whole or of a substantial part of the contents...
In effect, this particular Sui generis right officially legitimizes the "[[Sweat of the brow]] doctrine" which (in the U.S., at least) had famously been minimized in [[Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service]].