Provence and property rights
Brian McMahon bm at iucr.orgMon Sep 20 14:51:31 BST 2004
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A quick initial comment. It's inevitable that CIF data will be repurposed in CIF format, so assertions about intellectual property and redistribution rights should be (a) part of the audit history of the file; and (b) verifiable against checksums. So we might have (without any claim that the suggested data names are optimal) loop_ _audit_copyright_date _audit_copyright_owner _audit_copyright_details _audit_copyright_checksum_md5 2002 'W. Plinge' . '25219b1586fa67a279ef9fb988d23c19' 2003 'J. Doe' ? '6cd63e9ef1f1e3117f67addfb497bb9c' 2004 'American Chemical Society' 'Transferred when submitted for publication' '6cd63e9ef1f1e3117f67addfb497bb9c' Comments: (1) While not relevant to the technical discussion, I'm curious to know the circumstances in which Peter envisages Plinge transferring the copyright to Doe - or do they jointly own the copyright, but from different dates? (2) The purpose of the checksum is to validate that a file matching that checksum is (probably) the identical file to which the associated assertion relates. If the file has been changed in any way, there is no way to reverse-engineer the changes to reproduce the file corresponding to the stated checksum. On the other hand, if there is a dispute and Plinge (let us say) can produce an original file with the relevant checksum, that will provide evidence to support his intellectual property claims. (3) In my example, the checksums for Doe and the ACS are the same (which almost certainly wouldn't be the case if a true MD5 checksum were used). Do we want a checksum that validates the *exact* content of a file (so that you need to preserve OS-dependent line endings, comments etc) or that simply in some way validates the "essential contents" of the file, e.g. excluding the copyright assertions? (4) Requiring mandatory checksum generation may be too heavy a burden on older CIF writers, but perhaps we can aim for a start to generate such things for the CIFs redistributed off the IUCr web site. (5) Is there a case for including some sort of digital signature (where available) into each loop packet to strengthen the associated rights assertion? Present practice for Acta C and E papers is that they are submitted as CIFs. These enhanced CIFs include the text of the paper; the author transfers copyright of this material to us. (By the way that simply is present practice - we're happy to make other arrangements if the author wishes to retain copyright or if there is a general movement in that direction.) Since we may change the text during editing, in practice we carry the copyright along into the final version of the paper, and we don't wish to expose the early draft to public redistribution. Therefore the CIFs served as supplementary materials represent only the data component of the submitted CIF - that is, they are a subset. A general legal question: is a licence to redistribute (according to the NIH or BOAI model, say) the sole prerogative of the copyright owner? If so, then we would need to think rather carefully how to manage the serving of data CIFs from our site that came from different authors who wish to retain copyright but license redistribution under various conditions. A controlled vocabulary would most certainly help here, so that we could implement a policy to redistribute anything tagged with certain approved prorocols. Brian
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