>This brings up an interesting question. What part of the ICDD database is
>copyrighted? Surely the diffraction data itself is in the public domain.
>Most of the data have references to publications in the scientific literature.
There is nothing to discuss. A copyright is a copyright. Imagine you
start a collaborative research with somebody in Cuba. Your colleague
send you a message asking you for a powder pattern. Mr. Copyright
says "you can't do that !". So you reply to your colleague "sorry but
you must buy the database or ask the ICDD for copies of individual
entries at a very modest cost (which covers the duplication fees)."
It is well known that in the real world, the rules are violated so much
frequently that this is a pity. Please go in the (copy)right direction now.
Armel
Armel Le Bail, Laboratoire des Fluorures URA CNRS 449
Faculte des Sciences, Universite du Maine, F-72017 Le Mans, France
http://fluo.univ-lemans.fr:8001/ and/or http://pcb4122.univ-lemans.fr/