I wish to make a public statement of thanks Dr. Winburn for his cogent and
well targeted comments, (see below) about tapping into data bases that
others have paid for.
The thrust of his comments applies equally to the ICDD's data base (PDF). A
possible slight difference is that not only money but also a great deal of
volunteer time has been put into the PDF right from the beginning. Without
the volunteer effort there would have been no PDF. Here is another under
appreciated fact about the PDF: It was started with about 2,000 patterns
contributed by one of those monsters that Armel, among others, loves to
hate: a money making corporation, The Dow Chemical company
-Ray Young, former ICDD Board member
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At 08:13 11/11/2000 -0600, Dr. Winburn wrote to the Rietveld list:
>Let's put this in perspective.
>
>Is stealing $20 from a bank ok because they have thousands of dollars and I
>only need $20?
>
>In essence that is what we are doing when we give ICSD data online. Last
>time I saw a copy of the ICSD, the database had a copyright on it. It is
>then illegal to transmit the data to any party that has not already
>purchased a copy of the database. Anyone following the news and the Napster
>case is finding this out (Napster, btw, is an online music community -
>sharing music files the users download and trade for other music files).
>Borrowing from the philosophy of companies on stealing: "Everytime somebody
>steals something, it raises the prices for everyone else."
>
>Having a searchable database online that you could pay per structure would
>be ideal. But how cost effective? How many structures would be retrieved
>per year? How many licenses would they lose? We have to remember, this is
>a company providing a service for a fee - its not free (no matter how much
>we would like it to be). If you want it for free, go to your nearest
>University library, settle in (because it will probably take a while), and
>start looking through the literature until you find what you need. The
>typical comeback to that is, "But I have better things to do with my time!"
>Guess what, that is why you PAY someone else to do it (they have already
>spent a considerable amount of time doing just that...pouring over
>literature references, checking and double checking!)
>
>As for their tax dollars supporting the heating costs at NIST, they probably
>do. But that has nothing to do with with this issue (and yes I do know that
>NIST is taking over the responsibility for distributing the ICSD). But, if
>that does make a difference, I'll take a couple of free bottles of XRD SRMs!
