copyright and watermark
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)
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.)
Note that this might not even be intentional. Suppose you synthesized Engelanol and reported its synthesis with a melting point of 87.9 degrees. Unfortunately, sometime between your lab and the printing press, a pair of digits get swapped and the published value ends up being 78.9 degrees. Given that the real melting point *isn't* anything close to 78.9 degrees, you (and the publisher, and any court of law for that matter) can be fairly confident that anyone who reports that value took it directly from your paper. Jonathan Brecher CambridgeSoft Corporation jsb2@camsoft.com 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)
Note that this might not even be intentional. Suppose you synthesized Engelanol and reported its synthesis with a melting point of 87.9 degrees. Unfortunately, sometime between your lab and the printing press, a pair of digits get swapped and the published value ends up being 78.9 degrees. Given that the real melting point *isn't* anything close to 78.9 degrees, you (and the publisher, and any court of law for that matter) can be fairly confident that anyone who reports that value took it directly from your paper.
Somewhat off topic I know, but when the original logarithmic tables were published, the author is alleged to have inserted "deliberate" mistakes to be able to detect such copyright infringements. Closer to the Internet, we have all noticed how HTML authoring programs invariably insert meta-data, which I know is widely picked up by robot indexers. Should you be as ill advised as to use an incorrectly licensed copy of the authoring program, your actions can very easily be detected in principle (if not, yet, in practice). Taking this analogy one stage further, XML is often described as a "rolling stone", or lossless data medium. If for example, one performs some calculations on a molecule and expresses the output in XML, meta-information about the calculation could easily survive all the way into any final publication, including eg the serial number of the program that was used to perform the calculations. One final foray into copyright (actually trademark, which is rather different). In 1995, we organised a "Best of the Chemical Web 95" poster display, and we wrote a covering page. One of the posters related to an interactive display of protein structures, and it was described as a "protein exploratorium". Five years lapsed, when I was "contacted" by a robot. It was apparently trawling the web finding all occurances of the word "exploratorium", which the San Francisco Exploratorium had trademarked for its museum, and asked me to remove the word. As it happens, our lawyers here concluded that since it was in the Oxford English dictionary, it was in common usage, and hence probably our use was defensible. Still, imagine a publisher trawling the web looking for "78.9" and sending out legal letters to any web author it finds using that term in relation to a melting point of a specific molecule (something XML would make easy).
From which one might conclude that XML could either be a lawyers paradise, or an author's nightmare! --
Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 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)
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.
An interesting question. We have been working on XML, which can be described in many ways, one of which is a way of capturing information components, or perhaps fragments. Thus a <synthesis> can be easily identified within say a large collection of chemical information. If one combines this with another recent technology, of digital signatures or "watermarks", then one has the possibility of say an individual author "signing" either a complete document describing many chemical components, or of say a part of a document, such as a synthesis. An article of ours is about to be published in Chemical Communications which will be made available in its entirety in the original XML which (were it to be about synthesis) could be so signed. See http://www.W3.org/Signature/ for more information about XML signatures, and http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chimeral/ for more information about how chemistry can be captured (not yet signed) using XML. See also http://pubs.acs.org/reprint-request?ci980336g/v8Eo for more information about how resources can be signed. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 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)
Michael Engel wrote:
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.
I have asked our collaboration partners at the Telecommunications Laboratory and Telecommunications Institutes I and II of the University Erlangen about news on this topic. He told us that the student who is developing the watermarking algorithm has some problems in the moment. So there is no end in sight, now. However you can get further information at theseh.rzepa@ic.ac.uk sites: http://www.LNT.de/~eggers/wmchemie/wmchemie.html http://www.LNT.de/~eggers/ With regards Frank Oellien -- Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg Naegelsbachstrasse 25, D-91052 Erlangen (Germany) Tel (+49)-(0)9131-85-26579 Fax (+49)-(0)9131-85-26566 email: Frank.Oellien@chemie.uni-erlangen.de WWW : http://www2.ccc.uni-erlangen.de/oellien/ http://www2.ccc.uni-erlangen.de/ChemVis/ 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)
participants (4)
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Frank Oellien
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Jonathan Brecher
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Michael Engel
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Rzepa, Henry