[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] CAS Discourages Using SciFinder to Help Curate Wikipedia

Sat Mar 8 16:58:07 UTC 2008

On 08/03/2008, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:

>  of CAS numbers.  But CAS has sued -- and I think successfully --
>  to discourage this, claiming either that they own the idea of a
>  single master database of unique identifiers for chemical
>  compounds, or that having a competing set of identifiers would
>  sow confusion.

OH REALLY.

Yeah, I can see that playing well when publicised.

>  Whatever the legality of the situation, I'm betting Wikipedia
>  isn't the first information service to have incurred CAS's wrath.

We haven't actually incurred their *wrath* as such.

But if they've actually sued people to try to maintain a monopoly on
the *idea* of numerical identifiers, I think they've just incurred
ours. Do you have details or pointers to such?

- d.