On jeudi 8 Juillet 2004 12:07, Alan Hewat wrote: > I am all in favour of a serious debate on this question, but now we have > one commercial company criticising another without hearing from the other > side. And responsible people advocating behaviour that may be illegal.
I would really like to hear the other party, which is why I tried to list a few possibilities under which the ccdc position would be understandable. > Databases are protected by European law. Their value is not just the > isolated structures obtained by individual scientists, which are published > for everyone to read, but the relations between these structures and the > ability to search for, compare and derive relations between structures. > Indeed Dr Putz has said as much. The parameters obtained from the database are an _extremely_ far derivation from the database itself. I am a strong defendant of intellectual property, but there has to be reasonable limits, which you do not seem to accept. > You can argue as you will about the morality of having to pay for using > databases. But the law says that a license for either CCDC or Endeavour is > an agreement between two consenting parties. If the license says you can > use the database/software for some things and not others, and you break > that agreement, then you are breaking the law. This is only true if the license agreement is itself in agreement with the law and not overly broad. Do you really believe that every license agreement is a Word Of God ? If it says that CCDC has rights over _every_ derived works, it is too broad - period. If the CCDC does not (and I do _not_ know the actual policy, I hope they respond and quench this debate) want to acknowledge a limit to these derived works, then the _only_ way to determine the actual limit is in front of a court, unfortunately. Hence my suggestion : I am not very fond of legal litigation, but sometimes it is the only way to sort things out, and if things go the american way, it is the way of the future. But what do you think personnaly, Alan (an others) ? What limits would you put on the derived works of a database ? What is acceptable: A) publishing all raw coordinates of all structures B) publishing all interatomic distances in all structures C) publishing distributions (curves) of interatomic distances D) publishing interatomic distances in a few (<10) structures E) publishing an energetic law (with a few parameters) which was validated with information from the database F) nothing. To me, A-B are clearly unacceptable, C-D should be at least tolerated in a scientific community, and E is clearly acceptable. -- Vincent Favre-Nicolin Université Joseph Fourier http://v.favrenicolin.free.fr ObjCryst & Fox : http://objcryst.sourceforge.net
