[WikiEN-l] CAS Discourages Using SciFinder to Help Curate Wikipedia

[Philip Sandifer]

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