On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Hans Falk Hoffmann
<[email protected]> wrote:
What about privately funded research results? They are not so
different. If patented they move into the public domain only after
about 20 years of privileged use. Society could debate different
(shorter) time spans and limited privileged use to increase the
common use and to appreciate or validate the contribution of the
underlying public scientific base. Pharmaceutical results are quite
prominent in this as their gainful use may adversely affect the
health of many millions of people.
There is a confusion here between copyright and patents. The information in a
patent is in the public domain; reproducing this does not infringe copyright (in
most domains as far as I know). The patent gives the inventor 20 years
(depends
on jurisdiction) to *exploit* the patent.
Patents are useful to my group because they are one of the few sources of
chemical information that we can use automatically for text-mining without
infringing copyright. We have done this for tens of thousands of patents from
USPTO and EPO. By contrast we have tried over years to get closed-access
publishers to allow textmining for chemical information and been treated with
disdain. We can only use publications where there is a clear licence of at least
CC-BY. It is apparently more important to preserve income for publishers than to
allow published information to be used in a modern manner.
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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