Hello Thank you very much for your valuable comments on my copyright question. I am certainly on the safe side when I get the OK from the original publisher and/or the author. It looks as if the whole problem is much more complex as I even imagined. Atomic coordinates are probably not the pure data as they seem to be, as we measure intensities of the reflected X-rays and calculate the coordinates from those. So the pure data are the intensities. Despite the understandable need for protecting own data, I find it a little bit doubtful that published data are not the correct data - addition of that watermark mentioned by Frank Oellien. That goes in the wrong direction. That resembles the practice of some people/companies to "not tell everything" in published procedures in patents (and also publications). In my oppinion, published data need to be true and reliable. Otherwise we will come to the situation where we publish an abstract and a sentence like "Send me a cheque and I will send you the real data." (Exaggerated, I hope.) Off course, I do not think that Frank Oellien and his co-workers plan to do so. I understand their intention well. I have also problems understanding why some people (even already famous professors) cheat so much in not making reference to other people's work. It would be interesting if Frank Oellien could add some further comments on that topic, e.g., the the outcome of that thesis, title, URL. This watermark method has been recently discussed and used in published pictures on the internet and I have heard some intentions/tests with text files too (sorry, don't remember where I read it). Does chemical data do get a watermark in the future ? How do we watermark a synthesis ? That's interesting and I hope for some further insights and comments. Regards Michael chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)