I hesitate to raise a very open-ended question on this list, but I'd be grateful to know if anyone knows of WWW resources (or established practices) relating to what is 'fair use' of specifically chemical information on the WWW. [I'm writing in the context of preparing material for our virtual course on Structure-Based Drug Design, so my primary orientation is educational. Typical questions are the extent to which authors can 'quote' from the WWW, and whether students can copy material for inclusion in submitted work.] Firstly, it is universally agreed that there are no definite answers to any copyright problems. The only sure answer is to get permission from the copyright owner (if they can be identified, and if they take the trouble to respond). Otherwise decisions can only be made in courts in a particularly country. I have read through some of the many links from: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ and http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProprty/cprtindx.htm which are good places to start from. Abstracting (very generally) from this, the factors weighing in favour of 'fair use' i.e. use without consulting the copyright owner are: - educational, non-commercial use - restricted distribution (e.g. for a particular course of students) - it is a small part of the resource from which the material was copied - the material is factual - there is no essential loss of income to the author. - attribution of source For text-based material it is often possible for authors to summarise parts of documents, but chemistry is a partially graphic subject where in some cases graphics is the only way of transmitting chemical information. An obvious example is the use of a chemical structure diagram, reaction schemes, mechanisms of enzyme action, etc. To avoid unstructured discussion on this list, I'd be particularly interested in existing documents about chemical or biological copyright on the WWW. One problem with most of the (freely published) documents about copyright is that they are also copyrighted without any indication of permitted use :-( It would also be very useful if the current and future publishers of chemical material on the WWW could give an indication of what they regard as 'fair use' of their material. This could include some or all of: - copying a small percentage - use for non-commercial purposes - any use so long as authorship is retained and copyright quoted in its entirety, etc. - mirroring This may (possibly) reduce the risk that the material is abused unknowingly - it will probably not reduce deliberate misappropriation. P. Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100 Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)