Peter, > That's good news, but can I check what you mean by "free". There are two > uses, > * gratis as in free beer > * libre as in free speech. > > gratis means only that you have a temporary access to a good. This > privilege can be withdrawn at any stage and the recipient does not own > the good and cannot make further use (re-use) > > libre means that the recipient has full rights (except attribution) to > the good and can re-use it for whatever purpose. It is exemplified by > the CC-BY licence from Creative commons or the Open Knowledge > Foundations "Open Data" button. > > I cannot speak for the Blue Obelisk as a whole - no-one can - but their > mantra is Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards where open=libre. > > This is not to belittle your offer, but gratis alone is not generally in > scope for Blue Obelisk - e.g. to create derivatives works, etc.
One of the fundamentals of copyright law is that collections are not subject to copyright. The data from eMolecules is nothing more than a very large collection of data that was gathered, by various means, from companies and web sites where it was made freely available. In order to assert copyright, the collector has to transform the collection in some useful way that adds creative content. The eMolecules collection has no such creative transformation, it is merely a collection. (IANAL, check with your own legal counsel if you need a legal opinion.) That's not to say each molecule in the collection is "free". A molecule can be patented, and its drawing (the 2D coordinates) may be subject to copyright. Anyone can "erase" copyrights by simply running the molecules through his/her favorite 2D depictor such as OpenBable's --gen2D option. But the patents, if any, won't go away. Thus, eMolecules can't grant or deny any rights to this data, all we did is to collect it, which gives us no ownership at all. If it's useful to you, I hope you'll use it. It was a lot of work to collect this data, and we spend a lot of time and money keeping it very current. If there are legal or philosophical issues that make the data undesirable for someone's project, then that person shouldn't use it. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
