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."
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.
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!
:)
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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
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
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
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"'
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.
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!
Another great resource is "http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathland_archives.htm l"
The truth shall set you free!
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....
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...
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.
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!
> 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.
Copyright depends, usually, on the medium your work is published in and your history as a writer. For example, most (not all) magazines buy first north american serial rights, giving them the right to print your article in magazines distributed in north america, but you can still sell second/third/etc rights for printing elsewhere. You can sell international rights, movie rights, and so forth. Some publishers insist on all rights. In fact, I once wrote an article on VPNs for Auerbach's data security journal, which I believe is/was a division of CRC press, and their terms were all rights, so it wouldn't surprise me if the whole conglomerate thought that way.
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).