Slashdot Mirror
Sweet, Sweet Mathworld Is Gone
Jon Wild writes: "Eric Weisstein's online encyclopedia of mathematics, originally located at http://www.treasure-troves.com among Eric's other encyclopedias, and most recently hosted by Wolfram Research, has for some time been the most complete and reliable mathematical resource on the web. Now Wolfram has yanked it due to a lawsuit by CRC Press, the publishers of a print edition of the encyclopedia. See the announcement at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."
Tell me about it. I use it weekly, and even contributed a minor fixes and clarifications. Eric always responded quickly and thankfully, and I was gearing up to make some larger contributions. I hope this gets resolved quickly.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
They have every right to expect a fair profit from a book they have contracted, but this is ridiculous. In my email I suggested that a better strategy would be to ask Wolfram to insert a small ad for the printed book on the site. I for one didn't know it even came in a printed version.
I really hope this gets resolved. It was one of the Internet's better points of reference.
-John
In a related note, mirrors, although a nice gesture, will probably only hurt the author, who did not take this site down voluntarily. Also, flaming the author won't win you any marks, not even moral outrage ones, because he is fighting this also.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Now that we live in such a highly technological world, the benefits to corporations of getting patents on basic mathematics becomes clear.
In fact, the benefits are so obvious that it would even be worth some brib^H^H^H^Hinvestment in the effort to make sure that patents on basic mathematics can be obtained and enforced.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Oh god no! Math is not a language. Math is not an errand boy of science either. Mathematics is the process of precise and perfect (free from contradiction) thought. I have mathematics in my mind, but what I write on paper is just symbols... NOT math. 1+1=2 are symbols that you see in your web browser, but the concept is something which exists in all intelligent humans from birth, but from birth, we do not have these names or symbols associated with the concept of 1+1=2. The concept is intuitive, in the sense of Knronecker and Brouwer's constructive mathematics. Brouwer especially, argued against the hopeless linguistic approach to mathematics, pushed by the formalists - such as Hilbert . Hilbert and followers believed that mathematics could be formalized into a language: complete, perfect, and free from contradiction. Of course, your intuitionists (mathematicians who believe that mathematics was a mental activity separate from language and symbols) warned that such an idea was a fruitless sterile effort - an impossibility.
So Hilbert proceeded with his program to formalized mathematics. He black-listed Brouwer from the popular society of mathematics, and then Hilbert failed. Brouwer claimed that a linguistic formalization of mathematics was silly, but it wasn't until quite some time later that Godel proved that Hilbert's program to formalize mathematics was absolutely impossible.
Because our schools teach us a history of wars, as opposed to a history of men who actually did society a great service, we have people who know little to nothing about what math is and why we have it and who helped along the way. Also, because Hilbert and followers were more popular than Brouwer and intuitionists, schools continued in the tradition of Hilberts inherently flawed program.
The mathematics that you were taught in school was most likely this flawed approach. That would explain why you believe that mathematics is a "language" - you were taught such. Now, it is up to you, to correct your understanding of something which was incorrectly taught to you. Taught to you as a formal language of symbols with a finite set of rules that you had to memorize -rules which govern the movement of these sybmols, rules which are then applied to the symbols, in order to generate new theorems.
Mathematics is a purely mental occupation, where you create exact and perfect ideas in your mind. These ideas, most likely, do not exist in any true sense, outside of your mind. Because we are all limited in the quality of memory, we use formal symbols to aid in our mental constructions. Because no man has ever communicated his soul, his mind, directly with another man, we use formal symbols to aid in a form of crude communication of our perfect and exact ideas.
I believe, that once people understand what math really is, they see the beauty.
It's not a humanity. Humanities deal with human things - note that history of Greece is a humanity, but the history of the dinosaurs (paleotology) is a science - and math does not deal with human things.
But anthropology is considered a science and deals with humans. Same with sociology. I'm not sure whether I'd consider mathematics a science or not, but the dealing with humans aspect is irrelevant.
IIRC, they can't copyright a mathematical formula, they can only copyright the words they use to explain it. Should be possible to copy all the formulas you want, but provide your own explanations.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This may have been true once upon a time, and is probably still true for many older scientists, but consider this:
Would you rather gain prestige with the old crowd (who will be dead in 20-30 years) by killing trees, or with the young crowd (who will still be in their prime 20-30 years from now) by making valuable information available for free with frequent updates? Which is the investment in the future and which to the past?
How so? Does calling for a boycott of your publisher negate their obligation to pay your royalties? Is this something written into these kinds of contracts?
How do you get royalties for something that doesn't sell? That's the intended result of a boycott, correct? Not buying something. You can't get royalties from something that nobody buys. And if it doesn't sell, it doesn't get published any longer. Usually, if an author wants money from one of his/her published works, he/she encourages people to buy one. If you tell people not to buy one, the royalty checks stop coming in.
I just called CRC to complain about this move. After moving through a couple levels of management, I was assured that MathWorld's absence is only temporary, and that the issues will be resolved within a couple of weeks. If enough of us complain, CRC may feel more pressure to be reasonable. I encourage others to call, too. The phone number above is toll-free in the US, and if we slashdot their phones with complaints, maybe the company will learn something. I know that CRC has spent many dollars of postage advertising to me by direct mail this semester, and I suspect I'm not alone amongst Slashdot readers. Let's politely raise their awareness that such things are a bad idea. Remember, the person you are talking to did not personally decide to sue Eric/Wolfram. Be nice, and they'll be more willing to complain to higher-level managers for you ;)
other phone numbers for CRC:
US/Canada: 1(800)272-7737
Europe, Middle East, and Africa: 44-1462-488900
India, Asia, South America, and Australia: (561)994-0555
>There's no valid ethical reason to restrict
>its diffusion by patenting its presentation.
CRC didn't patent it's presentation, they copyrighted it.
While the facts and theories presented by Eric's encyclopedia were public domain, the manner of presentation of those facts and theories is copyrightable by both law and precedent.
This is probably why they were suing him. The only way to decide if his encyclopedia was too similar is to let the courts decide.
(Of course, as usual, IANAL)
-RobHood
I'm not an anti-{insert OS} zealot. I just like blowing people's little minds.
Seems if we all called over and over we would raise the cost of doing business for them. (800 number and all)
Some one is agnry????
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Were there any mirrors ?
This is precisely why I make local copies of several of my favourite reference sites and put them on CD. I'm sick and fucking tired of sites disappearing on me when they were a great resource. I've got stuff from 1992 hanging around somewhere, just watiting for the time when I need that bit of information that I had the instinct to back up before it disappeared from the face of the local BBSes.
Maybe I'm just an information packrat but I'm sick to the teeth of shit disappearing on me. The pages of the 'net need to be written in indellible ink.
This very summer a began writing my proof for one of those $million math problems. (Which one, I am not yet willing to disclose, but you'll likely hear soon!) It took only two weeks to "see" the solution, but four months to type it up in a format that is useful to math journals. (That four months included teaching myself the LaTeX layout language from scratch.) Already written into this proof is a grateful acknowledgement to Weisstein and his contributors for the resource provided at mathworld.wolfram.com .
I almost bought the CD edition before this news broke... but now those guys are costing themselves another customer! Eric Weisstein will get his acknowledgement whether or not this is resolved. It is for authors, not distributors, that the incentives of copyright were created. If the publishers' hunger for money only costs themselves sales, it will be poetic justice.
What we need is a P2P math exchange program: Mathster! Trade your favorite equations, theorems, proofs and computations with like-minded individuals.
Then us math junkies and scientists could get our Math for free. We would also be screwing the onerous, monopolistic Math empires who sell Math at egregiously high prices, and profit off of poor, starving mathematicians who are stuck with terrible contracts.
Remember, Math wants to be free!
Vive le Math!
:)
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
These are the same people that make the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" - *THE* crypto book (for doing real work) available on the web:
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
That's the *whole* book. I know everyone will flame CRC for this, on the assumption that if they do this one thing that looks pretty stupid, they must be entirely clueless, but here is at least one example of them not being the embodyment of evil.
my 0.02,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
The funny thing about all this is that a lot of the contents was added by visitors of the web site. It was (in some part) an "open documentation" project. It sucks that they've taken it off the air. But now I feel there's only one possible next thing to do, and that is to go out and buy that (very very very expensive) encyclopaedia, it will cover most of the web site's contents, but won't have all the other "open" submissions and hyperlinked structure.
This is indeed a sad day...
Anthony,-
Regardless, why is it the obligation of the accused to remove the content until proven innocent?
(IANAL) If an ISP deletes potentially infringing content first and asks questions later, DMCA says it's 100% immune to liability.
This seems somewhat backwards to me...
So does the rest of DMCA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Too bad the cache is completely useless for this website, none of the links are rewritten and none of the images are cached. Not to be hostile and belligerent but why don't you try your own links before posting them?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The text is there, but all of the graphics are gone.
Email them anyway.
Every second faceless corporate website I look at seems to provide next to no contact details for anything other than "Order Enquiries". CRC's website seems to be one of them. The only email even remotely close was orders@crcpress.com so I've sent them off a polite message telling them that I am a both a book nut and a technical person and that I will never buy another one of their books ever if they proceed with this lawsuit.
In the meantime I'm doing my bit through google's cache like has been suggested.
:wq
Whatever happened to migrating toward 'paperless environments'... Is all of U.S. laws driven by one simple motto - greed, and nothing but?
Sad, it truly is... patenting knowledge, patenting one-clicks, copyrighting knowledge that's been there in excess of 200 years, patenting the sound of the Harley-Davidson... what's next? Patenting quarks because someone proved they're there first while working at Mega-greed-corp. Inc.???
--
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
But anthropology is considered a science and deals with humans. Same with sociology. I'm not sure whether I'd consider mathematics a science or not, but the dealing with humans aspect is irrelevant.
Dealing with humans is nessecary for being a humanities. It could be that it's not sufficent for being a humanity, or that some subjects (like the two you mentioned) are both sciences and humanities, but that doesn't affect the fact that math is not a humanity.
Note I didn't say whether math is a science or not. The world isn't disectable into sciences and humanities.
When will companies realize that having stuff available online is more advertising than anything? I would have never have heard of the actual book if I hadn't found the web version on google. I was tempted to buy a copy before, but not anymore.
Got Apathy?
Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more brownie points in scietific cicles for publishing anything on dead tree than publishing it online. Even if neither version are peer-reviewed, the dead-tree version counts for more. It doesn't matter that the online version is of higher quality or have more readers.
It is also more accepted to quote from dead-tree sources than from online sources, which is a further incitament for authors to publish on dead tree.
About quoting; Assume that you are reading a paper which then references eg. Mathworld. At the moment, you're crapped. There's no way anyone can verify your claims. Paper has not only stability, but there is also very large framework for locating the information.
You need to do more than just put your findings on a .tex-file on your homepage. That's almost equivalent to having the only hardcopy on your own bookshelf. There are on-line mathematical archives, though, which provide electronic math articles, and I'd love to see that become the standard (in addition to journals and conferences, naturally.)
Online texts are useful in some situations, but extremely annoying in others. Personally I prefer my math as a book when the issue is more than one or two pages. Printed .pdfs and .pses just won't cut it. And the prestige is something; even I, a 21-year old CS student (ie. an information highway roadwarrior), would be excited about getting my stuff in a Book. Any old fool can throw stuff to ~/public_html/...
Despite my luddite feelings, I think Mathworld was one of the most best sites on the whole web. I had thought of sending some entries there, since I ran into "Become a Contributor" -buttons once too often :) Now... we'll see. I hope and believe the site will come back on-line, but until then I'm doing math the hard way.
[ Antti Rasinen ]
But, if you can browse it, we can have it. eWatch goes to extreme lengths to defeat such measures by any normal standard, but give me the teeming millions of bored sysadmins with a perl or python interpreter, a /29 or better to their name, and some desire to do it and we can make 'em look like the pikers they are.
If everybody who frequented the site with any regularity makes a tarball of their browser cache RIGHT NOW, probably including summary database files, and we get those collected someplace we can surely reconstruct the site. In fact, how's this: Somebody whip up a program to comb your browser cache for, and save out, URL's matching a pattern. Put it on freshmeat, get a followup posted here, and I'll volunteer to at least collect the results and attempt reconstruction.
Or we could wait a few days until the site comes back on its own, at two words and 30 banner ads to the page and all new "intellicast.com"(TM)(R)(F-'em) type delivery assurance tricks.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ had a robots.txt file at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/robots.txt (now changed) that forbade spidering of the site except by a few specific search engines (including Google, which is why they have its pages cached). Not only that, but there was a legal page at the site that explained that any IP address that downloaded pages in bulk would have its entire subnet banned. You could not mirror this site. I don't think anybody has an offline copy of it.
The original robots.txt file was identical to this one. Also see this similar legal page.
Depends. In truth math is a language.
It is often called "The language of science" it is a way of describing things in very precise terms.
However - it is not very different from some branches of philosophy. Come up with some ideas of a base system - certain unprovable fundamental definitions (like "a point is a single position, and takes up no space") and then use those as the rules and dervie whole new forumlas to describe everything.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's clear you never saw the site, or the book. It's not the fact that it had a lot of equations that made it so great. It's the fact that every single one was hand-edited by Eric himself, and that the explanations are extremely clear as far as math books go. Not to mention the hundreds of illustrations, Mathematica source code, thousands of hyperlinks, and tens of thousands of bibliographic entries. A community of people could produce something containing more stuff (though that would take a while) but only with the dedication of a single person will you get a work so unified, complete, and consistent.
I have it in hardcover and sometimes open it up to a random page and read just for fun. For example, Eric's story of Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most enjoyable, complete, and also concise descriptions I have ever read, and it's also totally accessible to someone with only a small background in math. Amazing!
Copyright law only lasts 75 years or so after the death of the originator. Hence you can quite happily churn out Mozart CD's without paying his (no doubt many) decendents a bean, but you still have to keep paying Yoko money for the beatles stuff
Padark
The server had a pretty sophisticated script that would detect people who were attempting to download the entire book in bulk, and lock them out. It would have been difficult to get around, probably requiring a highly distributed "attack" over a long period of time.
This is truely a sad day! :-( As far as content goes, this was definitely one of the more useful sites on the web.
Ditto. Mathworld was the greatest. Better than porn even!
[...]
I didn't keep a copy of the form, but I'm almost certain that I assigned copyright over my entries to CRC.
I hope you don't mind my asking, but why? A freebie book is a pretty cheap price to put on something you contributed to an effort to build a useful public resource.
does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created??
I dunno. Maybe you should ask Frank Zappa, Aimee Mann, and Don Fogerty about what it's like to be sued by the very company that sells your music. In Fogerty's case, he was accused of plagarising himself.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
Why be a copyright thSlave when you can be its Mathster?!?
Color me THERE!
Were there any mirrors ?
If not, is it still possible to make some from stuff people have downloaded ?
Anyone in a country who couldn't get sued - set up a mirror !
It's a bloody shame what greed does to such wonderful, freely accessible gems. I wish more resources along this line would be published under an open content license... After all, the expansion of one's mind shouldn't be restricted by such silly lawyer games.
---
I can't imagine how you can replace the CRC handbook of physics and chemistry, but for math I suggest documenting and contributing to the GSL (GNU Scientific Library).
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What if Pythagora, Euler, Pascal and Minkowski sued this editor for publishing their works without paying any royalties to their descendants.
Come on : Science is Public Domain.
There's no valid ethical reason to restrict its diffusion by patenting its presentation.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
How so? Does calling for a boycott of your publisher negate their obligation to pay your royalties? Is this something written into these kinds of contracts?
This reminds me of something. I have a professor who has co-authored a niche book about computational solutions of partial differential equations. The book sells for over $100. He says he gets only a few dollars per book sold, and that it has sold in the low thousands, although it has become canonical for advanced post-graduate study in the field. It was written in TeX, although the publisher had it re-typeset when it was published (since typesetters need to get paid), and thus, MANY errors were introduced.
Basically, we talked about it in class, and I asked if the monetary compensation was worth all the frustration, or whether he would rather have just published the TeX source on the web, where the errors were fewer, and could be updated. He thought about it and said that, in retrospect, the money wasn't worth it, and that he would have preferred to just publish his correct, up-to-date version. The prestige of publishing an accurate version of such an important work, would likely more than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just in increased consultation fees.
Something to consider, if you plan to publish a book for a small niche.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
What if some site that hosted gpl'd code written by other people were to make a book using that code and the publishing company tried to shut down that site. Would the gpl be the only thing protecting the material or would the writers of the code have a say about when and where the code could be published.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Eric sold the rights to the Math treasure trove to CRC, although I'm not sure what the terms were.
*However*, the treasure trove was built up over many years and largely user-contributed. So it is not clear that Eric had claim to the rights in the first place. It's much like the CDDB case.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
These days, it seems that American capitalists have embarked in a struggle against the free flow of information on the Internet, by filing lawsuits, "inventing" new on-line services that you have to pay for, etc. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but this could lead us one day to a proprietary Internet where the only free information is the advertisements.
We all know that the best way to get rid of all this nonsense is to host free content and services in countries other than the U.S. and the core E.U. This will also have the wonderful site-effect of boosting the education level of the people of such countries. Imagine mirror farms in paces considered by many as "third world", serving knowledge to the entire humanity. Free software, free education, free books, music and movies, free communication for all.
Unfortunately, no one has done this at a large scale, yet. Why? Don't know. The only thing I know is that if I had some money (to set up the servers and buy an E1 line) and some help, I'd be glad to do it myself.
Anyone interested?
skillos@yahoo.com
On the other hand it still has the physics and other sections there (am meant to be learning about thermo right now..). Hopefully these sections won't get pulled as well (before I get a chance to read them at least).
It's not cool I don't think to post stuff on the web that's in print and for sale by somebody else who's done a lot of work getting it in print and on sale. That said, it would be a damn shame to have the Internet become a giant shopping mall instead of the most incredible public library imaginable. Perhaps something can be worked out like the Rosenberg's did with Napster.. http://www.therosenbergs.com/ .. /dd
I received a reply from Kimberly Taylor at CRC Press, in response to mail criticizing the lawsuit against Wolfram & Weisstein. The response included reference to the decision of the court (Acrobat document) regarding the nature of the lawsuit, and why CRC is choosing to pursue it. In short, the decision of the court is to permit CRC to continue the suit against Wolfram, on the basis of copyright infringement once the MathWorld site was transferred from the original site to the WRI MathWorld site. They're also suing Weisstein for breach of contract.
Their web address is Here.
The site gives a feedback contact for the VP of Electronic Content Developments, but I doubt that's the appropriate person to be talking to about this matter as the page states it is for questions/comments regarding their webpage, here's that link: here.
They also have a Rights and Permissions page where people can obtain permission to use their material, and that includes a link if you have any questions regarding that: here.
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
I asked CRC Press for some background of this case and they pointed me to this court document which concludes with the order to shut down mathworld.wolfram.com.
This a sad day for Mathematians. I enjoyed browsing through the site just reading. Someone else should set up a new site for Mathematians to share information.
very cool. thanks.
but is there anything like mathworld anywhere else on the Internet?
_____________________
best slash sites:infantililsm.org
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
A politely worded commemnt to him may have better results.
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
CRC just screwed up with me, a potential customer. I wont buy their works now, It is to the copy machine with them. And I can, legally, because I have that educators umbrella over copyright law. Too bad for you CRC. Besides, the CRC didnt even think up their work, like physical constants to 9 digits.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
> Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more
> brownie points in scietific cicles
> for publishing anything on dead tree
> than publishing it online. Even if
> neither version are peer-reviewed,
> the dead-tree version counts for more.
This is somewhat true but it varies by discipline, and the situation is changing (albeit slowly). In any case it is possible to publish a paper book and keep strong online publishing rights - some of O'Reilly's books come to mind. I would not be surprised if more academic authors start to get wise to the benefits of negotiating publishing rights more carefully, and of using free and open copyright licenses.
I wish we had a little more information on what exactly happened with CRC Press, but it does seem like a dumb PR move on their part even if they were within their rights. But maybe this points to the need for a truly free (in the GPL sense) online math encyclopedia on the web, one which cannot be taken away from the community in this way? I am not willing to start or manage this but if there were a well-run project I would certainly consider contributing.
I was expecting to see the book priced at
$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not something that was popular enough to
be De-CsSed and mirrorred around the globe
*before* this happened. It's up to the community
to make it impossible for this to happen.
Well, what I mean is, Weisstein could have
complied with the order without the web losing
the resource altogether.
Screw the web for publishing. It's not free enough, in it's current form, to be revolutionary.
Somebody invent the next thing please. You know,
the thing that makes the Web of today look like the Web makes the internet before 1993 look. Or something.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
...which means I'm really sorry that I didn't even know the place existed until now, and that google's cache isn't going to help a lot. We're gonna hafta get archive.org or somebody similar to cough up their archives someday.
Assuming the site was such that it was feasible, anybody got a wget'ed copy or something, so we can start passing the whole site around as a tarball? I'm a lot more interested in this stuff than DeCSS.
Royalties are based on the number of books sold, no? If there is a boycott of the book, fewer copies will be sold, no? So you will get fewer royalties, no? So, encouraging a boycott of your own book/publisher hurts you financially, no?
I could explain it again if you want....
Relating to open-source textbooks, there's a very good, anti-copyrighted text on applied mathematics here. It was written over the author's many years of TAing the required applied math course at Caltech.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
> It won't hurt Weisstein, it can only serve to show CRC Press that you won't stand for it.
I only wrote one article last year's summer, so I am quite sure that it was not included in the printed version nor on the CD-ROM. If it was included then Mr Weisstein would have violated his contract with CRC, so it would only stregthen that company's position. And I do not wish to see him being punished for being a bit naive when signing the contract -- he did a good job maintaining that site for free public use, and I am sure that it will go on-line soon again as I have the impression the trouble is mainly caused by the rivalry between CRC and WRI.
I urge all contributers to think about rewriting their contributed material to Eric's web page, and perhaps making it better. I plan to rewrite my material and submit it, only this time I will stipulate that it MUST be public domain forever. The best thing that could happen is all of us to realize that mathematical knowledge must remain free for all. I sent an email to David J. Packer, publisher of CRC Press telling him to remove my material from his book/CDROM since they did NOT have my permission to use it. Other contributers might think of doing the same. - Randall
If we're talking about the brilliant, ever-howlin' lead singer of Creedence, that's John Fogerty! You're correct in everything else but this small detail...
--
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Actually, we do know the exact terms of the publishing contract: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/WeissteinBookCon tract.html
Looks like the problem is that he signed over copyright of the whole thing to CRC (see section 5).
My Web Page
Open your encylopedia up to 'discussion' the next time and read that.
If you want everyone to get along, watch TV or make your comments on a ZD* site, where they're filterered.
Let us have our arguments in peace. Thanks.
And I prefer both. bitform is a better reference (like someone else said), and paper works better from front to back (I can take it on the train).
A further note: Eric's website is the prime point of advertisement for this disputed publication. If they think paid ads in the dead tree journals get them nearly as many sales as the free adversitement on Eric's site... they've got another thing coming! Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!
It's worth noting that in Germany copyrights cannot be sold, only licenses can be issued. The copyright will always remain with the author.
The companies there reserve the right to publish in certain medias though.
Yes, until congress changes copyright law again. They could decide to give copyrights to "facts", as their is legislation to copyright "databases". Entirely possible considering that there is no public interest representation anymore in congress.
So, imagine paying royalties on E=mc2. (Einstein died in 1955 - copyrights with the CTEA now go for life plus seventy years after death!)
I have in my possesion a "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" put out by the Department of Commerce circa 1964. That could be scanned and put online. However, that does not cover any developments since 1964! (or any detailed proofs for that matter). But something like that might be used as a starting point for a free online version.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This is coming just as a user of the site for quite some time. Shortly after he published the book (a couple of years back), he started only letting you access three letters per day (for instance, you might be able to see the entries starting with B, F, Z one day, and A, G, M the next. After about a year or so of this, he opened the whole thing up, and then Wolfram hired him and moved the thing to their site. This is really a shame as it was a fantastic resource for someone who reads a lot of technical papers and needs to look up unfamiliar terms. Luckily, my officemate has the book so I suspect I will be borrowing it quite a bit from now on.
There is a CD-ROM version, so if one were so inclined, I believe it is HTML and could be posted.
I'm truly sad to see this go. I've lately been using it almost daily for studying and all. Of course I could buy some huge book, but for reference material with relatively short descriptions hyperlinked, searchable text is so much better suited than paper. For textbooks paper is still much better (because computer screen is harder to read). Although I preferred the simple pre-wolfram, non-new media infested, layout.
Infact, right after the book was first published, before wolfram started hosting the mathematics part of treasure troves, there only were a few random letters browsable daily. So, the contract may have taken some of the rights. Later having found mathworld at wolfram again, I thought they had bought the rights from CRC. But I don't know..
Nevertheless, I got this (stupid?) idea of a petition to save mathworld, if someone had the time and will to put such up. It probably wouldn't help, but people could easily show their support for such a site.
You can't have it both ways. The guy could've supported the site on his own, but he wanted money from a book publisher. He probably could've gotten relatively few bucks and kept the rights for himself, but of course the company would offer more money to secure all the rights, and that money must've looked pretty good to the guy.
If you don't want lawyers trouncing on you, stay independent and don't take their money to begin with. I hear people bitching about ethics, but there's no ethics in taking somebody's money and then not fulfilling your agreement -- that's called fraud.
sounds like a good idea F=ma
best slash sites:infantililsm.org
One solution, it seems to me would be to set up a similar website, with each useful equation taken from a source other than CRC. Ie derive it yourself OR better yet, look in an old math book for which the copyright has expired, perhaps one in Germany or something.
I realize this requires work, but if everyone supplied one equation..... Well just a suggestion...Disclaimer: I never got to see the site sadly....
I was using this site as a primary text for the graph theory class I was taking. It was much less obtuse than the textbook for the course (it's always good to use more than one source anyway).
Math students everywhere are feeling this pain!
--8<--
--8<--
You are right, CRC probably has the right to do any damn thing they please with the encyclopedia (leaving aside problems like contributions of third parties). I also agree that it was mistake to sell them all the rights (if that's what actually happened). Yes, they probably have the right (its up to the court to decide). If I buy a large piece of forest and turn it into a parking lot, or just cut it down so it wouldn't compete with my nearby hunting resort, I will also have complete right to do it. But I can't be surprised if people get pissed at me for that.
We are not discussing whether CRC had the right to do it (as I said, it is not up to us to decide), but whether it was morally right thing to do (which may not be the same). I understand that they had a problem with the site. Wolfram Research is not completely of the hook - if I remember correctly, the site had plenty of links to WR, but none whatsoever to CRC - I can see how that can piss CRC off. But I still think that shutting down the site was very wrong and inconsiderate thing to do. And from the marketing point of view, it probably wasn't even very clever thing to do. Unless they manage to convince people that it was actually Eric's or WR's fault, there will be quite a bit of mathematicians and other scientists mad at them for quite a while.
AccountKiller
The idea was to eliminate typesetting-introduced errors.
Funny that history repeats itself, again, and again, and again...
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Going back to who owns the copyright of the individual entries, a lot of entries on the properties of sequences of integers were submitted by Steven Finch of MathSoft. Steven still maintains a website with this material on, so I wonder if CRC will start chasing him? (Maybe he has a separate agreement with CRC, though - I don't know.)
Incidentally, some academic journals in mathematics allow for authors to have an electronic version of their papers on their homepages. The AMS is one example, where you will often see in the copyright notice on a paper `copyright retained by author'. A lot of other journals turn a blind eye. (As you might expect, the copyright notice in the CRC Encyclopedia is the standard `it's ours so hands off' one: no reproducing or transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, etc etc.)
My own feelings are that the best place for the encyclopedia is on the web. Some of the entries are mathematically wrong, and many are misleading. This is not a criticism of Eric, who obviously put a lot of work into the project, it's just a fact that a book containing so much material will contain many many errors. (See the (often extrmely rude) posts from about 5 years ago on sci.math.research complaining about the lack of mathematical precision in the treasure trove!) Having the treasure trove on the web would and should have allowed the project to grow, both in terms of the accuracy and the number of the entries. Sadly, the only way that such errors could be corrected in the printed version would be for CRC to issue a second edition - something I would imagine Eric is now unlikely to want to get involved in...
Oh, you mean that you want all the math assembled in one place, with a nice, clear, explanation of all the difficult bits? Well, how would sir be proposing to pay for that monumental task?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
To: General Contact
To: Bob Stern <bstern@crcpress.com>
To: David J. Packer <dpacker@crcpress.com>
To: Cindy Carelli <rpowers@crcpress.com>
CC: Eric Weisstein <e.weisstein@wolfram.com>
To CRC Press:
I am extremely disappointed to hear that the MathWeb site has been taken down due to a lawsuit filed by CRC press. This website is a treasure -- one which I browse from time to time in order to expand my mind, and to which I have referred curious high-school students. I believe (though I have little but my own convictions to go on) that this wonderful site can only HELP sales of the book version CRC published, by making a great number of people aware of its existence. I also believe (and I am much more sure of this, as I will play my own role in it) that the bad press and poor public opinion that CRC earns by closing down a site as well-respected as MathWeb's will FAR outvalue any possible increased sales of this single book.
Finally, I would argue that even if you DID hope to profit from this lawsuit, that it is nonetheless inappropriate on purely moral grounds. A resource like Eric Weissteins MathWeb should be made available to every middle-income black child in South Africa, every underpaid inner-city Chicago schoolteacher, and every assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton -- of the three, only one has a realistic opportunity to purchase your book.
I sincerely hope that you consider these issues and decide to withdraw your suit against Eric and others, allowing MathWeb to be reinstated. If you do so, please write me at mcherm@destiny.com to let me know.
-- Michael Chermside
I would tend to disagree with your statement about math not being a science. Math is the basis for most sciences. Math is one of the only fields that reaches into everyother "real" field of study. I also disagree that in science it is impossible to prove anything.
And Karl saw that it was good...
In that, one of my reasons was that on-line research was useless. Information on line that a researcher would really want was not there. Only an "abstract and an order form," I said.
Sadly, this is one more case where I'm right. On-line research, as promising as it might seem, doesn't work. I really liked Eric's Treasure Troves. I also like books. I don't like on-line resources getting the shaft so we have to buy a book.
Not to mention the fact that these niche books cost a fortune, and many students that need the resources can't afford them. There's no economies of scale on publishing runs that are only a few hundred copies.
I guess I'm turning into a curmudgeon, but as long as publishing houses are around, I don't see much changing.
Jeff
Without math, we would all be living in the stone age. Every major technological development of the 19th and 20th century depended upon some sort of mathematics. As I am working on my PhD in applied Mathematics as we speak, I know this to be true. I.e. if you hate math so much, you should also hate Computers. All computer science is is loser-level math. -Karl Math makes the world go 'round
And Karl saw that it was good...
Eric's work in college was tremendous, we seem to agree on that. After college, though, if he wanted to continue improving the site he needed to make money. He found a place in Wolfram that would pay him to continue his work and leave him largely autonomous and unrestricted. You think he could have done this as well part-time as hobby? No way! He didn't sell out and he wasn't greedy, he found a means to mold his work and not starve. I guarantee he isn't getting rich off this endeveour and calling him greedy is just wrong.
I have used Weisstein's encyclopaedia many times over the years and found it very useful. But one problem I always had with it was that Eric didn't always seem to understand what it was he was writing entries about. It seemed to me that he was just copying equations out of textbooks sometimes. In places he was copying from rather ancient texts and was using pretty non-contemporary notation. One day I was expecting another author to come chasing after him for stealing their text. My concern came true but not in quite the way I expected! Sad though, it was a hell of a useful site.
--
-- SIGFPE
I think that this is an excellent excuse to make a new grass-roots math web database, perhaps based on the Everything engine. Perhaps I'll see what I can do about this.
-- My comment is above.
The John Fogerty case is particularly interesting because it more closely resembles a trademark issue than a copyright issue.
John was sued because his later works were similar, not neccessarily plageristic, but sytlisticly similar. i.e., you could tell they were works by John Fogerty.
It's as if Mark Twain were sued for writting and publishing Huck Finn by the publishers of Tom Sawyer.
CRC didn't walk up to the web host and say, "you're hosting illegal content". They walked up to the American company whose site it was and said, "you're distributing illegal content".
It doesn't matter whether it's hosted in your office, or in the Cayman Islands. The lawyers aren't going to try to physically shut down your server. The lawyers are not usually even going to call your hosting company. They're going to send you a cease and desist, and your corporate lawyers will say "better listen to them".
Besides that, this isn't some great moral crusade. This is a published book that the author wanted to distribute online, probably (I'm assuming) in violation of his contract with the publisher.
I assume that CRC Press does in fact own the rights to most of the material found in Mathworld. Then the right thing to do would be for Wolfram to pay CRC Press for the rights to publish Mathworld online (I would be surprised if CRC isn't willing to work out some sort of licensing deal with Wolfram).
Wolfram is after all a commercial enterprise, and obtains considerable publicity and prestige from the publication of the material; it would be unreasonable to expect CRC to allow Wolfram, a rival publisher, to benefit from this without benefit to itself.
> Did they give away ownership by contributing?
I didn't, this is impossible under German copyright laws. But I would not insist on my rights because I don't want to cause Mr Weisstein even more trouble with that company.
I've been a long-time fan (and occasional would-be mirrorer) of Eric's treasure trove, and I must say he's brought some on himself. First by selling the rights away and then by agressively fighting mirrorers (detecting them and banning them by IP). Eric gave us a wondering and complete Single Point of Failure, and now it has failed.
That said, the Treasure Trove project was a Herculean effort, and I really loved his work. I don't blame him for "selling out", I'm just saddened that things worked out the way they did.
More than anything, I think that we need a good bit more info on the CRC lawsuit. "Existence of a threatened lawsuit" isn't a whole lot of information to work off of, and that's all I can get from the appology at the wolfram site.
ominous rumblings
If, as some people have said, the wolfram site didn't have any pointers to the CRC site, I would expect to find that this problem has been brewing for quite some time. I mean, what author wouldn't provide pointers to his (supposedly) royalty-generating publisher from his very popular web site? There needs to be a reason for this, and I doubt that it's going to be pretty.
If we're going to respond intelligently to this incident, it would be valuable to have some more info on the real history of this dispute. It's much easier to ride a horse if you know which way it's pointed.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Back when the paper version first came out, CRC complained about the whole content being available on the website. Eric modified it so that only 10 of the 26 letters were available on any given day (at random). You might have to wait a day or two to see a given article, but it was still more useful than it is now. Perhaps Eric could go back to that scheme.
But given that this scheme was dumped and the whole thing put online, I thought the copyright problems had been cleared up. I wonder why they've reneged on that.
I was seriously considering buying the paper version so that I could look things up when there was no internet connection handy. I'm having second thoughts now.
Here's an example of a perl script that could download all the text only from google's cache (I think) :). Hope this pasting doesn't ruin anything...:
e :";
/\//, $file;
#!/usr/bin/perl
# This script is for your education only, do not use this!!
# If you execute this, you yourself are the only one
# responsible for any consequenses, good or bad.
use strict;
my $DEBUG=0;
my $cache_start="http://www.google.com/search?q=cach
my $cache_stop="+&hl=en";
my $slash=`pwd`;
chomp $slash;
sub rec_get {
my $url=shift;
my $get=$cache_start.$url.$cache_stop;
my $file=$url;
$file=~s/^http:\/\/[^\/]*\///;
if ($file=~/(^|\/)$/) {
$file.="index.html";
}
my @f=split
$file=pop @f;
my $olddir=`pwd`;
chomp $olddir;
my $udir;
for (@f) {
unless (-e $_) {
mkdir $_,0755 or die "Can't mkdir $_: $!";
}
$udir.="$_/";
}
chdir "$slash/$udir";
print "file=$slash/$udir$file\npwd=" if $DEBUG;
print `pwd` if $DEBUG;
return if (-e "$slash/$udir$file");
open F, "curl $get |" or die "Can't execute curl: $!";
@f=<F>;
close F;
open G, ">$file" or die "Can't write $file: $!";
print G @f;
close G;
for (@f) {
if (/<a\s+.*?href=\"(.*?)\"/) {
my $t=$1;
&rec_get("http://mathworld.wolfram.com/$udir".$t) unless
$t=~/^(http:\/\/|\.|\/)/;
}
}
chdir ($olddir);
}
&rec_get("http://mathworld.wolfram.com/");
Provost Zackarov of the university
Alpha Centauri
Betcha $0.05 that I screwed up the comment...
Surfing is religion
you are silly
Surfing is religion
you are silly
I Hack You! - Ninja Fish
Cool. You can get student-written course notes, from the Cambridge maths degree course, with varying free-ish licenses from http://www.cam.ac.uk/Ca mbU niv/Societies/archim/notes.htm.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I have bought several books that were available for free online. For something that you read front-to-back, IMHO paper is the more convenient form. Reference works (like mathworld) are a different beast. I saw the CRC book once in a bookstore here in Germany, realized that this was the print version of Eric's Math Treasure Trove, and didn't buy it. Not because it wasn't free, but because it had no Search button.
I really hope Wolfram can (and wants to) make a deal with CRC and continues to host mathworld. Or Encyclopaedia Brittanica realizes that if they want to stay the #1 knowledge portal, they need license Eric's work.
Though we don't know the exact terms of the publishing contract Eric Weisstein made with CRC, does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created?? I'm sure there must have been some kind of clause allowing for the web version or else it wouldn't have survived this long. I find this very puzzling and disturbing. CRC won't be getting any of my business until this can be cleared up.
Where -else- is this content to be found?
...or, if necessary:
Is it available to buy, somewhere else?
BTW, if it's as useful as an early poster suggested, maybe it's worth rewarding its creators?)
As someone finishing my engineering and physics degrees I should be glad that mathsworld was there to help me when I needed it. Oh shit I've still got one computational maths assignment left...
What can I say, I am sad and disappointed. Mirror, mirror, mirror. Thanks.
I have used these resources several times. Even though the stuff on Fourier transforms is a bit basic, it helped me to get up to speed this year.
A real shame to see it go.
Sigged!
I've published 17 books in the last 12 years, so I've been through the grist mill with publishers ranging from McGraw-Hill to Microsoft and O'Reilly. So I know a bit about the business...
For every publisher I've seen, the standard "boilerplate" contract assigns copyright to the publisher. An author must ask to keep their copyright, even from someone like O'Reilly.
The reasons for this are obvious: The copyright holder has enromous power, especially under the Berne Convention. As such, publisher want to hold copyright so that they control the work. As an author, I want copyright to my own work -- and I've refused to publish with companies who insist on taking the copyright.
Authors must exercise caution! Watch your publisher like a hawk; even the "good guys" make "honest" mistakes about copyright. I've had publishers forget to file the proper papers; I've had publishers print their corporate copyright notice in a book that is, by terms of the contract, under my copyright. "Oops, sorry, our typesetter goofed!" -- yeah, right guys. Don't believe a publisher when they say "it's not important who owns the copyright", because it d@mn well is important.
Intellectual property is the most important property that exists! ... and that is why corporations want to control copyrights and patents. Real estate, computers, cars, even your clothes -- they're all ephemeral, a disaster away from being destroyed. The only thing you truly own is your mind and your ideas -- don't ever let anyone claim to own your mind.
All about me
When you transfer your copyright to a publisher, you lose control over what's going on. In retrospect, Eric Weisstein should have kept the copyright of MathWorld for himself, but how could you know? Are there any publishers out there that will let you keep the copyright of your work?
It's not a humanity. Humanities deal with human things - note that history of Greece is a humanity, but the history of the dinosaurs (paleotology) is a science - and math does not deal with human things. Not everything can be divided into science and humanities.
Particularly troubling is the fact that at least some of the content was contributed by people who most likely intended it to be online where others could get great benefit from their work. Did they give away ownership by contributing?
And finally, where can we direct our well written statements of objection to this action by CRC?
Bleh!
don't tolerate this crap. write to the major investors in CRC demanding that they divest. spread nasty rumours about the company on stock picking boards. deface their materials in bookstores and corporate libraries. find the names of the officers of CRCPress, and torture them.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
This sucks; that was an awesome site. They had all sorts of cool thing like little 3d models of polyhedra that you could rotate. But it was also a good (though very concise) source of mathematical texts. It seems to me that Mr. Weisstein got himself into a corner with his contract bewteen him and the publisher of the print edition. Its too bad Wolfram can't simply buy those rights (wolfram is worth many millions of dollars, probably more than whatever stupid company publishes it) and use the worl of mathematics as a source of hits for wolfram's own site. Or perhaps allow access with a purchase fo Mathematica.I always wondered why they bothered selling the hard copy edition; the power and beauty of the thing lied in its easy navigation and instant cross referencing, both of which are lost in a print edition that will never be updated (at least physically).
Math is *not* the basis of science (experimentation is) -- however, math is, of course, a very useful tool for analysing scientific data, and for creating models and simulations, as well as being interesting as a subject in its own right.
It is obvious that a scientific theory can't be proved because tomorrow, a new experiment could be performed that would disprove the theory. This happens all the time in science -- old theories are thrown out almost daily; what was thought to be true is now thought to be false. In math, however, once a theorem is proved it is true forever. The two fields can't be more different.
Rich O'Hanley
Christian Kirkpatrick
John Wyzalek
David J. Packer, Publisher
Cindy Carelli
Gerald Papke
Nora Konopka
Bob Stern, Publisher
Sunil Nair
Kirsty Stroud
Bob Stern
Barbara Norwitz
Becky McEldowney
Carol Hollander
John Sulzycki
Fequiere Vilsaint
John Lavender,
Bill Feldman
Chris Richardson, Director
Arline Massey,
David Packer,
Drew Gierman, Publisher
CRCweb_feedbaca
Or here are the raw addresses for cut and pasting into your mail program.
rohanley@crcpress.com
ckirkpatrick@crcpress.com
jwyzalek@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
rpowers@crcpress.com
gpapke@crcpress.com
nkonopka@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
snair@crcpress.com
kstroud@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
bnorwitz@crcpress.com
bmceldowney@crcpress.com
chollander@crcpress.com
jsulzycki@crcpress.com
fvilsaint@crcpress.com
j.lavender@uk.crcpress.com
newsdiv@crcpress.com
crichardson@crcpress.com
amassey@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
dgierman@crcpress.com
jlavender@crcpress.com
I have not yet sent my own letter (I will in a few minutes), so please do not blame me if any of these bounce. Enjoy.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Can anyone fill in on the whole story? What is the basis of the CRC press suit? Was there copyrighted material on the web site or is this groundless?
Rich O'Hanley
Christian Kirkpatrick
John Wyzalek
David J. Packer, Publisher
Cindy Carelli
Gerald Papke
Nora Konopka
Bob Stern, Publisher
Sunil Nair
Kirsty Stroud
Bob Stern
Barbara Norwitz
Becky McEldowney
Carol Hollander
John Sulzycki
Fequiere Vilsaint
John Lavender,
Bill Feldman
Chris Richardson, Director
Arline Massey,
David Packer,
Drew Gierman, Publisher
CRCweb_feedbaca
Or here are the raw addresses for cut and pasting into your mail program.
rohanley@crcpress.com
ckirkpatrick@crcpress.com
jwyzalek@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
rpowers@crcpress.com
gpapke@crcpress.com
nkonopka@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
snair@crcpress.com
kstroud@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
bnorwitz@crcpress.com
bmceldowney@crcpress.com
chollander@crcpress.com
jsulzycki@crcpress.com
fvilsaint@crcpress.com
j.lavender@uk.crcpress.com
newsdiv@crcpress.com
crichardson@crcpress.com
amassey@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
dgierman@crcpress.com
jlavender@crcpress.com
I have not yet sent my own letter (I will in a few minutes), so please do not blame me if any of these bounce. Be polite, but do not pull your punches. Enjoy.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
The cache isn't completely useless. You are right about the images but all the formulas are embedded in the html as comments in latex syntax. A perl script to fix the links wouldn't be too hard to code.
I would have really liked to have a site like this. I hope it comes back. Until then, are there any sites like this out there? I often find myself in need of a mathematical reference like this one seems to be.
"don't know what you've got til it's gone"
- joni mitchell, i believe
On that note, maybe there should be repository for things like this. I know there is Yahoo! and the Opentext directory, but perhaps there should be a (relatively) small directory of sites like this. a "best of web" directory. just a thought...no real ideas here yet. think about it.
--------------------------
best slash sites:infantililsm.org
While most contributors will probably accept a parallel print version to the project they contribute to, I can't imagine they would be happy if the original purpose of their contributions, to share it with the community on the web, is not honored anymore.
Does anyone know whether these people have any legal rights? Shouldn't they get part of the royalties? Could they sue CRC to take out all passages contributed by them unless it is published again openly? It would seem to me as though it is impossible to take such a work of many people out of the public domain without either completely rewriting it or getting everyones permission...
> The prestige of publishing an accurate version
> of such an important work, would likely more
> than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just
> in increased consultation fees.
Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more brownie points in scietific cicles for publishing anything on dead tree than publishing it online. Even if neither version are peer-reviewed, the dead-tree version counts for more. It doesn't matter that the online version is of higher quality or have more readers.
It is also more accepted to quote from dead-tree sources than from online sources, which is a further incitament for authors to publish on dead tree.
Anyway, this is really a tragic loss. Maybe we can convince CRC Press to open-source Calculus? Then Richard Stallman can calculate the area under his curves.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
This development is trubling, but is what you expect when the information submitted was made available under a non-open license. (BTW : I don't expect even the Google cache to be around much longer if the CRC lawyers are diligent enough.)
I think an Open World of Mathematics would be an ideal GPL'ed open project to pursue. Fundamental mathemaics does not change significantly over time, and it should be possible to create a database of several hundred key topics, worked on by a comparable number of contributors, in categories organized by editors who review submissions for completeness and accuracy. Eric put in a massive amount of work, but if the work is split up into several hundreds to thousands of chunks, then each chunk is quite managable. Such an Open World of Mathematics would be a lasting contribution to the Net, much like Project Gutenberg is for world literature.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
I admit that when lawsuits were filed against other sites I didn't really care. I don't download much from Napster, don't watch too many DVDs on my PC, etc. However, math is one of my only enjoyments and I've visited Eric's page almost every other day. I would like to learn what is the basis of this lawsuit, and if it is nonsense I will help fight in whatver way I can this time.
CRC is just generating bad press with little or no positive upside potential. I'd be willing to pay a small yearly fee for online access (though I still feel it should be free as a goodwill gesture) but I don't know that I'd shell out 100 bucks for material that works better on the web.
I've always considered the Trove more of a gloss than an encyclopedia. For indepth information I'd always revert to the CRC Standard Math Tables (which, despite the name, are more than a set of math tables)
Math *is* a member of the humanities -- it isn't a science. In science, it is impossible to prove anything -- theories can only be disproved (well, what about Computer Science you ask? Well, that's just bad naming. CS really is a branch of applied math)
i hope CRC is happy, now that they have forced the removal of one of the most valuable sites on the internet. go away CRC, we don't need your kind on the internet.
Ok, so it looks like the person running the web site wrote the book, and probably sold all rights to CRC. That stinks. I wonder if they're still making good money off the book?
The print edition is titled the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, which implies that CRC either takes great pride in publishing it or owns significant rights to it. Eric Weisstein is prominantly listed as the author, which implies that he was either hired to edit it or sold them rights to publish it. So, the question is:
Who owns the Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics? Did CRC Press hire Eric to edit it, or did he approach them to publish it, and, if so, did he give them copyright (or any exclusive rights)?
If Mr. Weisstein owns it, his publisher dosen't have a legal leg to stand on unless it was granted exclusive electronic rights to the work. On the other hand, if it does have exclusive rights, CRC probably has the legal right to force the site down, regardless of whether it's morally right. If, when CRC bought the right to publish the Encyclopedia, it also bought the copyright, then Eric Weisstein is differently (and more) screwed unless he retained certain rights when transferring ownership. The most he can do is stop updating the work, start working on a new encyclopedia of mathematics, and encourage a boycott of his publisher (which will hurt him financially - he won't get any more royalties from the sale of the current book).
Where does all the NSF and other government grants go to? A mere fraction of those grants would be sufficient to make such a nice resource open to the public.
HavenCo!
= -
Man, will HC ever go live so we can stop reading about all these precious web jewels being trounced upon by lawyers?
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Except that both have standardized formal ways of deciding on the truth of something, that few other fields have. Art and philosophy have argued over some question for milenia without resolution, whereas the science and math both come to a resolution on the question. Really old theories that have been tested are rarely thrown out completely - they're usually modified. We still plot courses for spaceships based on Newton's laws. Once a theorem is proved, it can be found that the proof is wrong or didn't cover all the cases.
I'm not sure who holds the copyrights on this stuff, though; the ability to publish on line might be a part of the agreement when you have one of these journals publish your stuff, or they might just do it anyway and nobody complains because it's so useful.
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
SlashDot has gazillions of readers. Is it approiate for us a netizens to organise some some of protest? Would a gazillion hate email change their minds?
I wonder if Mr. Weisstein is really the hapless victim of corporate greed that everyone seems to be assuming. Surely he must have known the implications of selling the copyright to CRC, and must have been financially motivated to do so. According to one post by a contributor to his site, he actively solicited contributors to assign their rights to CRC as well, in return for a print copy of the book. I.e., he seems to have been very well aware of what he was doing.
I have no quarrel at all with anyone who seeks to benefit tangibly from their labor, but it seems that Mr. Weisstein himself is responsible for privatizing this resource, and that CRC is being villified mainly because they are the instrument of the privatization. If this is the case, then CRC is doing him quite a favor by serving as a lightning rod for the wrath of the user community.
This is in no way a criticism of Eric, BTW. He was presented with an opportunity to reap reward from what had been a labor of love, and he took it just like many of us would have done. I'm just not sure that martyrdom should be part of the bargain.
You got that right
Math *is* a member of the humanities -- it isn't a science. In science, it is impossible to prove anything -- theories can only be disproved (well, what about Computer Science you ask? Well, that's just bad naming. CS really is a branch of applied math)
Interesting post; I wish I had moderator points.
There's a stereotype that geeks don't do humanities, because they don't like anything that involves shades of gray or requires evaluating alternatives from multiple viewpoints. The fact is that most of the passionate arguments geeks engage in (C vs. C++; GPL vs. BSD; Closed Source vs. Open Source vs. Free Software) are exactly the kind of multifaceted and nuanced issues that you are supposed to need advanced humanities training to tackle.
Contrary to the stereotype, geeks have the intellectual equipment to address the humanities, and in many cases may have important practical knowledge to bring to bear on issues.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Eric's dictionary is good, but not the best. If you really care about having the best source, and are willing to pay the money, then take a look at the EDM2 (sorry about the Amazon link, but they have user reviews and a good description)
That said, the Treasure Trove project was a Herculean effort, and I really loved his work. I don't blame him for "selling out", I'm just saddened that things worked out the way they did.
Well, folks do need to eat.
Programmers don't have to worry about people copying their work, because programs are never finished and there will always be somebody who needs is willing to pay for something to be added. The more free copying, the more revenue opportunity.
Writers have a tougher time. The more free copying, the less revenue.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This does suck. Just yesterday, I direct a co-worker to this site to answer a math question. The google cache is still around, but not terribly useful; only the HTML itself is cached. All images, etc. come from the original site, and nearly all pages on mathworld contain a lot of images (basically whenever there's an equation whose formatting can't be handled via straight HTML, which means nearly all equations). Try bringing up the google cached version of a random mathworld page. Odd are, you won't be able to make heads or tails out of it.
There's always the Artistic GPL. Some industrious person could start an open mathworld replacement under AGPL, but I dread the idea of trying to get a large bunch of mathematically oriented people to succesfully contribute to it. Plus, it'd take at least a few years to get it back to a state comparable to mathworld.
You know, I'm pissed about this. I've used the treasure-trove to occasionally help with a school assignment. This is no small thing seeing as I'm a grad student in mathematics. Can't any intrepid /. admins work their pull with Andover to get a mirror of the pulled site up?
This really, really sucks. Can we have an update to complain to CRC Press? As if buying the CRC Handbook (clearly an oxymoron...) wasn't enough! I didn't even know that there was a print version. Now there is no way in hell I'll buy it. I already have all of the information in the thousands of dollars in text books I had to buy for uni, but it was a great convenience to have it at the click of a mouse. Truly a sad day for science on the Internet.
So, _this_ is news, yet the fact that the U of VA claims copyright on Shakespearean works isn't? Hello, inconcistency. =)
Unless CRC claims to have invented some of the math contained in their volume, which could not have been profitably produced without the protection of their copyright.
Humanities: also recommended for those who couldn't come up with a solid proof for anything if they're life depended on it. =)
Google has your mirror right here.
Will I retire or break 10K?