>Some readers may be interested in the following official position statement
>from the ICDD (owners and publishers of the Powder Diffraction File) ...
>>
>>... Violators can be prosecuted ...
The original question was actually about the ICSD (Inorganic Crystal Structure
Database) which is published by Fachinformationszentrum (FIZ) Karlsruhe, NOT
by the ICDD (International Centre for Diffraction Data), which is of course a
quite different organisation. (FIZ's ICSD contains the structural co-ordinates,
while the ICDD's PDF contains powder diffraction patterns - both are useful).
FIZ Karlsruhe have been quite generous in making a 10% sample of their
database available for free on http://www.ill.fr/dif/icsd and agreeing to
distribute the complete database (43,000+ entries) on CD-rom for personal
users at academic institutions at a cost of only ~$400 per year. The cost for
a central server is naturally considerably more, and I imagine FIZ would also
be very unhappy if the personal user license was abused.
Because structures have been studied by multiple authors, there is however
enough redundancy in the database that even the 10% free sample on WWW can
be useful in practice, but of course you would soon want to purchase the full
ICSD database, which is essential for anyone working with inorganic structures.
I do NOT speak for FIZ Karlsruhe, who might be contacted for an official position.
Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE fax (33) 4.76.48.39.06 hewat@ill.fr
ftp://ftp.ill.fr/pub/dif http://www.ill.fr/dif/