?Hello a "copyright" question:

Can I display crystal structures using atomic coordinates from publications on my webpage without the consent (but with citation) of the author ? Does it fall under "fair use" (sorry, don't know the exact term) ? What about very old papers (1930-50) ?

I would be happy to read your comments about this "problem".

Whilst no lawyer, I am certain that atomic coordinates are pure data and not subject to copyright. For example, no-one would claim that a melting point is copyright. I had this discussion with Frank Allen from the Cambridge Crystal database centre a year or so back. We agreed that acquiring coordinates for individual molecules from e.g that database, and representing them on a Web page was acceptable practice. Where scientific need requires it, representing a collection of molecules was also acceptable. We agreed that even perhaps 50 molecules could be so treated in order to demonstrate a trend. Clearly, representing the ENTIRE database (which IS copyright) would contravene that copyright. The region of say 50 - 500 molecules is shall we say a grey area. If the scientific needs mandates it, it might be considered acceptable. But your comment raises another issue. Increasingly, we are striving to achieve the separation of content from representation that has often been lost on the Web. Thus content is the raw 3D coordinates. These, like the Human Genome sequence, are data, and hence not copyrightable. But to view them, one has to apply a style. That style, which may be unique to the author, probably is copyrightable. Where data and style are irretrievably mixed (lets pick an explicit example of a VRML representation of a molecule, where the two cannot be untangled easily) the entire representation is presumably copyrightable. But taking another example, of say a Molecule invoked using the Chime plug-in <embed src=molecule script="rendering commands"> here the separation of data and style is much clearer. Arguably, you can retrieve the molecule data, but you should not use the script commands. Obviously, most script commands are really trivial, and could be regarded as being in common use, but a more elaborate script, which say rotates the molecule to a particular viewpoint, switches on certain fragments, colourises them etc, might be regarded as copyright. I write a length here because it is my fervent hope (indeed expectation) that this separation of data from style will get stronger, and hence that issues of copyright will in this regard clarify. Remember, by separating data from style, you do not have to apply the author's style, you can always apply your own. On this point, the Chime use of RasMol scripts is close to applying a CSS like stylesheet to the molecule. I wonder whether anyone knows of any formal effort to integrate such molecular stylesheets into the CSS2 formalisms? -- 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)