What Is License Behind The The Famous Boehringer Mannheim Biochemical Pathway Poster

Question

[Andra Waagmeester]

The Boehringer Mannheim Poster is famous. Next to it being available as a very esthetic poster for your wall, it currently is also available as digital scanned images. The latter is very handy to use parts of this poster for educational purposes. Unfortunatly I can't find a license agreement on the hosting website.

If my understanding is correct, then when no license is stipulated the use of the data is prohibited. So am I allowed to use the poster as is for education, which would include that students would use the knowledge to do proper pathway analyses.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

The PDF it says the following

Biochemical Pathways – Legends 
Copyright Boehringer Mannheim GmbH – Biochemica 
Courtesy of Spectrum Akademischer Verlag, GmbH

While that is not really an answer for the licensing terms but perhaps gives you an idea of where to look next.

In all honesty I would not even ask. In general when it comes to education the rules for reproducing/reusing content are far more relaxed - and is easy to make a case for the fair use principle. As long as you are not redistributing the content on a large scale format you should not need to worry much about licensing terms.

[Jerven]

As Andra Waagmeester is in the Netherlands, fair use rights might not apply. For him he may normally use them for teaching if the contents fall within the 'lesson' plan. If he is using them for wiki pathways editing, all bets are off as he must then also consider 'databank recht' a dutch/belgian concept.

Answer 2

[wdiwdi]

Spectrum Akademischer Verlag is now part of the Springer publishing house (the scientific publisher, not the newspaper holding).