Slashdot Mirror
On The Preservation Of Endangered Web Resources ...
An unnamed correspondent asks: "Recently Mathworld, what many would consider one of the more valuable Web resources, fell victim to a copyright lawsuit. We've seen in the past that through sufficient mirroring the community can save such resources (DeCSS for example) from similar legal onslaughts. What Web resources do you consider most valuable and/or most vulnerable to legal attack and is there any effort under way to mirror and preserve these resources?"
"Personally, I'd like to see an official community set up to protect such resources. Call them the Information League perhaps. Set up a mailing list for members and whenever some (perhaps corporate) entity tries to snuff out a Web site a member sends an e-mail to the list and all other concerned members could mirror the site."
You don't have nearly the "copyright" issues at that point (e.g., news-site.com might not want you to be a public mirror while they're selling ad-space and trying to live, but when they're getting their ass kicked in court, they may not be nearly as inclined to go after you for preserving their livelihood and image), and you can basically keep the "mirroring" active for a certain period of time and then drop it. (e.g., if I put out an APB today to "mirror slashdot", but in 60 days slashdot is still around, drop the mirror, the crisis is over.") You do that to conserve resources. Obviously if the system has been told (as in the above example) that a site IS down, then it holds on to it for as long as necessary (forever potentially), where interested parties could then mirror it themselves. D
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Private Essayist
Fresh from the FAQ:
Q: What's this about a lawsuit?
A: In March 2000, CRC Press LLC, a subsidiary of Information Holdings Inc., filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, claiming that the web site mathworld.wolfram.com violates their copyright in Eric Weisstein's CRC Concise Encylopedia of Mathematics published by CRC in November 1998.
Q: Why do they think the site violates their copyright?
A: Three and one-half years ago, Eric signed a book deal with CRC in which he agreed to provide printed, camera-ready pages for the encyclopedia. He thought he was selling them a printed snapshot of his existing web site, not the whole web site. CRC now claims that he sold them his whole web site, not just a printed book.
Q: So, did he sell them the web site or not?
A: Eric did not believe he was selling them his web site: he thought he was selling them the right to print a book and that he would be able to keep his web site up. If he had had more experience in the publishing industry, he would have insisted on a contract that made this crystal clear, but he didn't. Eric's contract, which is a standard boilerplate book contract that has probably been signed by many other CRC authors, does not give CRC explicit rights to the website. However, the court found that the contract is ambiguous on this point. What Eric intended to sell CRC is at the heart of this lawsuit.
Q: Doesn't the standard "right to reproduce in all media" clause cover the web site?
A: The web site is not based on or derived from the printed book: it existed for years beforehand. We believe and argue that the printed book is a derivative work. We don't dispute that CRC would have the right to put up a web site containing, for example, PDF files of the printed book. But we strongly object to the idea that their copyright in the printed book allows them to reach back and gain control of Eric's preexisting, ever-changing, collaborative internet community.
Q: Did Wolfram Research just cave in and yank the site to avoid trouble?
A: Absolutely not. We have kept the site up as long as we were able, but unfortunately CRC requested and was granted a preliminary injunction that orders us to take the site down until the case goes to trial. By direct order of the court, we had no choice and no alternative but to take it down.
Q: Isn't a lot more harm being caused by taking it down than leaving it up?
A: We respect the judge's well-reasoned opinion that the site should be taken down until the dispute is settled: he considered the evidence available to him in the legal record. He simply did not agree that the harm to the community at large would be enough to justify keeping the site available.
Browser? I barely know her!
You can post your web sites on Mojo Nation (warning: this is in beta! It is not stable, but it works.). Documents posted to Mojo Nation are not deletable. (This is due to some complicated peer to peer architecture and RAID-like splitting of the data into multiple redundant shares, of which you need only a subset to reconstruct the original document. See the web site for docs.)
Regards,
Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow