Re: Non-copyrightable work with non-free license.
Le Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 03:47:25PM -0700, Don Armstrong a écrit :
> On Wed, 04 Apr 2012, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > UniProt.org is registered in the US. Is there any reason to believe
> > this particular work is tainted by EU database rights?
>
> UniProt is part of EMBL, which is in the EU. That said, if the purpose
> is to get protein sequences for examples, I don't know why those in
> NCBI can't be used instead.
UniProt is actually larger: it is an international consortium, which
I am not sure if it is incorporated or not.
UniProt is a collaboration between the European Bioinformatics Institute
(EBI), the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Protein Information
Resource (PIR). Across the three institutes around 90 people are involved
through different tasks such as database curation, software development and
support.
UniProt is mainly supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant
1U41HG006104-01. Additional support for the EBI's involvement in UniProt comes
from the European Commission (EC)'s SLING grant (226073) and from the NIH GO
grant 2P41HG02273-07. UniProt activities at the SIB are additionally supported
by the Swiss Federal Government through the Federal Office of Education and
Science, and by the EC grants SLING (226073), GEN2PHEN (200754) and MICROME
(222886-2). PIR's UniProt activities are also supported by the NIH grants
5R01GM080646-04, 3R01GM080646-04S2, 1G08LM010720-01, and 3P20RR016472-09S2, and
the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant DBI-0850319.
http://www.uniprot.org/help/about
I therefore wonder to what extent the Directive 96/9/EC of the European
Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of
databases would apply.
There are alternative protein resources, such as from the NCBI, but the purpose
of the UniProt records in EMBOSS and BioPerl is their regression tests for
UniProt record parsing, so they can not be replaced.
I will wait a bit for other comments, and then re-contact UniProt as Ian
suggested.
Many thanks for your feedback,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
Reply to: