Slashdot Mirror
The Return of Eric Weisstein's World Of Mathematics
Many readers (like this Anonymous Coward) have written with the good news that "Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics, a free, online encyclopedia of mathematics was taken off the web thanks to a lawsuit by CRC Publishing. After much legal wrangling, it returns today stronger than ever. See it rise from the ashes at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
This really pissed me off, since I purchased the big CRC book back when I was taking organic chemistry, and I really liked that site. If I wasn't such a slacker, I would have probably written a letter to CRC about losing a customer. I am glad to see that it is back though.
Best Slashdot comment ever
It's hard to find good math sites for help. And with the dissmissal of any good sites, one must often times have problems. For those of us which are busy, websites are sometimes the best way to get help with math. Of course, I'm still on the idea that math is really un-important in the computer industry =) But that's another story heheh.
see it get slashdotted back into ashes...
Namely: it has taken a while to get mathworld put back online after an incident with lawyers only to see it taken BACK offline by the power of the Slash...
Lets see Lawyers compete with THAT one...
(posting anonymous, I want no more karma)
Damn slashdot effect takes it right back down. :)
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
And yet, it bows under the mighty weight of the Slashdot Effect. Good going guys, now it's back down again.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
www.mathworld.com seems to work, instead of the other link. Seems so obvious too.
the site's jammed up, and there's only 10 posts up here. Seems as though every single /.er just flew immediately to the site to see with their own eyes (ok, I admit I did.)
I hope whatever license agreement they had to work out to get the site back up isn't "per hit."
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
I was able to check out a bit of this site; looks like it'll be pretty interesting once it gets done being hammered. Though I must say, it's great to see that someone who was truly screwed by the copyright fascists receive justice in the end. Score one for the good guys.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
by helping to get it down with the dreaded slashdot effect.
I can't help but wonder... how much time until "slashdot effect" becomes a mainstream word?
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
``... the essence of mathematics resides in its freedom''
From Georg Cantor, Ueber unendliche, lineare Punktmannischfaltigkeiten, Mathematische Annalen, volume 21, in 1883.
The context of which Cantor extended the natural numbers to infinite ordinal numbers, with addition and multiplication defined on them.
Es ist, wie ich glaube, nicht nöthig in diesen Grundsätzen irgendeine Gefahr für die Wissenschaft zu befürchten, wie dies von Vielen geschieht; einerseits sind die bezeichneten Bedingungen, unter welchen die Freiheit der Zahlenbildung allein geübt werden kann, derartige, dass sie der Willkür einen äussertst geringen Spielraum lassen; dann aber trägt auch jeder mathematische Begriff das nöthige Correctiv in sich selbst einher; ist er unfruchtbar oder unzweckmässig, so zeigt er es sehr bald durch seine Unbrauchbarkeit und er wird alsdann, wegen mangelnden Erfolgs, fallen gelassen. Dagegen scheint mir aber jede überflüssige Einengung des mathematischen Forschungstriebes eine viel grössere Gefahr mit sich zu bringen und eine um so grössere, als dafür aus dem Wesen der Wissenschaft wirklich keinerlei Rechtfertigung gezogen werden kann; denn das Wesen der Mathematik liegt grerade in ihrer Freiheit.
babelfish at will.
Haven't finished reading it yet, but it is pretty interesting so far. Shame the article submitter neglected to put this link in his story..
This is great news! There are so many web resources that are becoming non-free or full of ads. I was sorry to see Encyclopedia Britannica go back to a pay only service. Slashdot is taking steps towards adding more advertising. The ads in Yahoo mail get bigger every day. I salute those that provide quality free services on the web and hope to see the trend continue.
I don't understand this classification at all. Why is this a story about 'my' rights ? I don't see how 'my' rights or 'your' rights were infringed upon when the site was shut down - while it is a nice resource, the "rights" moniker seems to imply some entitlement to this website. If someone shut down Britannica - say due to copyright issues - I certainly wouldn't be complaining about violation of 'my' rights. And I don't see any mention of access to and availability of arbitrary websites in the Constitution.
Surely we are not entitled to this website, after all, are we ??
I just went to the site to check it out, and I have to say it's really nicely done, and I'm sure there's a lot of great information there, but I read the first article about a new subset of normal numbers, and my brain hasn't hurt that much since MthSc 410!!! Thank God I'll never have to look at that stuff again!
(this is humor, I'm not slighting math as I think it's the most important subject, especially in early education, but that article is rather confusing to anyone who hasn't been working with that level of stuff for several years)
~ now you know
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Great news.
/. account to add
Specifiacally for this created
my 0.02 $ on that topic (not that's a big deal
but anyway).
MathWorld is great resource, one of the most
useful and easy to understand. Really missed it
while it was closed down. At least somebody takes
time to organize the mathematical knowledge in a
down to earth way (and give it out for free).
Not quite strong enough to stand a slashdotting however.
dreaver
It seems pretty weak to me to fail to handle a small /.'ing
Maybe welcoming a site back /.'ing it isn't all roses. Welcome back to the 'net by DOS ;), anyone have mirror links yet?
Couldn't they've pulled it off a few weeks earlier, in time for my math exam??!
See it rise from the ashes at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."
And see it's fall back to earth 20 seconds after this story is posted, as the Slashdot Effect carves another notch in it's weblog.
That was short lived.
But what the heck, knowing my luck, by the time I finish typing this and hit the submit button, there will probably already be 150 posts saying the same exact thing as this and I'll get moderated as redundant... I promise this at least was a unique and original post when I first clicked the Reply button!
A solution to the problem with music today
For those of you that don't know how MathWorld disappeared here's the whole story: http://www.mathworld.com/erics_commentary.html
It's a great example of what web publishing can do, and we are lucky that this has not become another example of old media squashing new media. This gives me some hope that the battle for unhampered digital music and film is not lost yet (although not much, all the math publishers together do not come close to a single record label).
As an aside, it's slightly unfortunate that Eric's return from the dead of copyright law is so closely followed by death by slashdot.
Anyway, welcome back Eric, and Thanks.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
~~~
This whole mess was due to his lack of a careful reading of the boilerplate. It was loosely set up so that the interpretation that CRC's legal team came up with (Which was that MathWorld was infringing on thier copyright). They kept asking for money, using a lawsuit as leverage, according to the blow-by-blow account on MathWorld- this isn't about infringement, this is about cash, pure and simple. In the end, Wolfram caved because it was cheaper to give the cheating SOB's what they were asking for than to fight for the principle of the thing.
If my job doesn't depend on something from CRC Publishing, I'm NOT buying it anymore.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Check out Eric Weisstein's ordeal.
There's a mirror here. My apologies, Eric
A short synonpsis might be: Eric spent from high school to present of his life creating this wonderful resource. One day he returns from lunch to find Sherif's Deputies waiting to serve him with a federal copyright violation lawsuit for publishing his work on the web. Now after more than a year of negotiations all of Mathworld belongs to CRC and Eric pays them so that he can continue working on it.
Print his story out and stick it in the CRC books of your local book stores.
Or contact CRC and tell them what you think.
CRC Press LLC Headquarters
2000 NW Corporate Blvd
Boca Raton,FL, USA 33431
Phone
1(800)272-7737 x6066
(561)994-0555
Fax -
1(800)374-3401
(561)989-9732
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
How many people have to post the same stupid comment about the slash dot effect? We all know it exists and we are all sick off scrolling through your redundant repetitive [sic] posts.
i'm sorry, but i don't see how this can be viewed as a win for eric (the creater of the site). crc still holds copyright over everything which was published in the book, extorted money out of eric and his employers, forced them to give crc press rights to future snap shots of the site, make contributers sign a crc submission form, and still have all rights to book. how has eric won? crc beat eric and wolfram with twisted copyright law, and in hte end got everything it wanted. eric and wolfram didn't win, crc won.
This isn't quite so much about "Your Rights Online" as it is about a person who didn't bother to understand the meaning of a contract he signed and became unhappy when the other party (CRC) pursued its own interests. (Not that I think what CRC was doing is a good idea, it's a poor way to do business.) But the only real lesson here is that before you sign a contract with a public company, keep in mind that the company's interest in making nice with you are way, way less important than its interest in making nice with its stockholders.
RTFContract.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
got it mirrored
Here's a thought for future story submitters: since any posting of this magnitude will guarantee a rapid /.ing of any posted site, why not make the links point to the bad guys, like CRC in this case? If I'm going to /. some web server and still not read the story (which is mirrored in a post below, BTW, just before I was about to post it), then I'd rather /. a server of some guys who quite clearly Have It Coming, And How.
Congrats to Eric and Wolfram, so sorry to see that you had to give in and settle, but on the other hand maybe you made the right choice in order to get this invaluable resource up on the web again. And now we know that CRC is just as low as Gracenote and other money-grubbing "fencing in the commons" corporate scum.
People talk about "piracy" of intellectual property. Well, guess what: downloading a song from Napster isn't piracy. But using a limited right of publication in print form to destroy an entire online encyclopedia is the very definition of piracy. CRC essentially boarded and scuttled mathworld, and now they're selling it back to the rightful owners a piece at a time. So from now on, when Hilary Rosen blathers about piracy, remember: we know the real pirates by their actions. They are CRC, and Gracenote, and any other company that takes a publicly-generated free resource and tries to coopt that resource for their sole gain. It's a valuable lesson: it takes real money and a corporate seal to be a true pirate these days.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I've been waiting for this day for the entire time the injunction has been in place. So I'm using it today, exploring through the Web of mathematical topics, and suddenly the Web site stops responding. "Hmm, I say, bet it got slashdotted."
max
The story's been slashdotted... so here's a cut and paste of the story on the other end of the shiny direct link to Eric's Commentary. After reading this, I don't think I'll buy any more books from CRC... but I guess they're making Wolfram pay for the books they don't sell anyway, so this probably won't do any good.
...the public will suffer no injury from a preliminary injunction because the Encyclopedia will continue to be available without interruption, from CRC Press".
Here it is:
What Happened to MathWorld
It is no secret that one consequence of the explosion in the popularity of the internet and related electronic technologies is that many battles will be fought over how information is created, stored, and accessed. It is equally clear that we all have a stake in how these battles are decided.
Below is an account of one such battle--the lawsuit served on me and Wolfram Research in the spring of 2000 by CRC Press, a publisher that generations of scientists used to know as the Chemical Rubber Company. This lawsuit was instigated by CRC Press after I had contracted with them to print and distribute a "snapshot" of my math web site in book form. My goal in recounting how that contract went awry is to give others an opportunity to learn less painfully what I have learned--especially about the deep cultural divide that appears to be opening up between most, but I hope not all, book publishers and their potential customers and authors. In particular, many publishers seem unable to understand a new generation for whom dynamic web sites are rapidly becoming a primary medium--sometimes co-equal with books, sometimes preferred over books--for gathering, extending, and sharing knowledge.
In this account, you will find links that will take you to extensive documents containing all you could possibly want to know (and probably more) about the lawsuit that took this web site off the internet for more than a year. What happened to MathWorld will happen again elsewhere. But I believe and hope that the lessons learned from my experience can reduce the frequency of such events in the future.
The following detailed summaries are extracted in part from an even more detailed exposition of the history of my web site contained in my affidavit in response to CRC's motion for an injunction against MathWorld.
How MathWorld Came to Be
I began collecting the material now found in MathWorld when I was in high school, and then continued the project as a college student in the late 1980s. As I collected them, I stored my notes on my state-of-the-art MacPlus personal computer and started sharing my collections of math and science facts with friends. "Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics," the predecessor site to MathWorld, first went online in 1995 when I was a graduate student in planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
As the site became more widely known and used, dozens of contributors offered new entries. Hundreds of others from around the world offered technical advice, criticism, and kind messages. The web site was in a constant state of evolution. It was a hugely rewarding experience. The growing volume of comments and submissions from the diverse community of users made clear that what had started as a labor of love for me was becoming a major math and science resource for thousands, just as I had hoped.
The Book: A "Snapshot" of the Evolving Web Site
As the web site grew, I came to believe that a snapshot of its contents in printed form could be useful. I myself do not always have a computer at my fingertips. A book would also make the material accessible to pre-college educators and people less comfortable with (or without access to) the Internet. (For some of you it may require some imagination to conjure up the dark ages of 1995, when web browsers were in their infancy and email was hardly the mass phenomenon it has since become.)
Although new material was being added daily, I felt that the Treasure Trove had become comprehensive enough (and sufficiently polished, due in large part to helpful suggestions from critical readers) that a snapshot of it would constitute a useful reference book. So in February, 1996, I began seeking a publisher to print and market such a snapshot. I presented a nearly complete paper manuscript to several publishers of scientific and technical books, including CRC Press.
Tales of warm friendships between famous authors and their longtime editors are legendary. I imagined that publishers must have a natural interest in retaining the good will of their authors, especially authors of works likely to be revised and reissued in new editions. When CRC agreed to publish the book, I therefore gave limited scrutiny to the "boilerplate publishing contract" they provided--especially since my editor, Bob Stern, characterized the contract as "very straight forward and easily understood." Its language and terms were standard in the publishing business, he assured me. So I signed it.
Lesson #1. (Where have you heard this before?) Never sign a contract until you feel that you understand and agree with, or at least accept, every clause in it. If you are not sure of the meaning or implications of any phrase or provision, find a lawyer experienced in your kind of project and take her advice! (This Lesson to be read repeatedly and committed to memory.) Also consult with authors organizations and make use of helpful on-line resources such as Wilfred Hodges' mathematical copyright webpage, a public page devoted to copyright issues in mathematical publications.
CRC's contract defined the "Work" with which I was contracting them as "approximately 1400 camera-ready manuscript pages and includ[ing] approximately 1200 camera-ready illustrations to yield a completed work of approximately 1408 printed pages[.]" I understood this to mean that I was assigning to CRC the right to publish the typeset camera-ready text I had offered them.
The Web Site and Its Relationship to Book Sales
In late October or early November 1998, as the book adaptation neared final production, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. Throughout this pre-publication period, my web site had been receiving a great deal of attention. I had posted on the web site an announcement of the imminent appearance of the CRC book; that announcement appeared to be generating a significant number of pre-release sales for the book. I thought things were going very well.
But now Mr. Stern was on the phone asking me to remove portions of the web site content in order to create greater incentives for online users to purchase the book.
I had always assumed that there would be at most a modest overlap between the set of people who were users of the web site, and the set of people who would want to own a printed reference book created by formatting a snapshot of the web site contents. It had been gratifying to discover that people in that intersection seemed enthusiastic about buying the book.
So I told Mr. Stern that I felt the web site was, on balance, creating sales for the book, not suppressing them. I was very reluctant to restrict free access to any contents of the web site.
However, in November 1998, against my better judgment, I began to comply with Mr. Stern's request. At first I did this by randomly choosing a set of letters of the alphabet each day and blocking all entries starting with those letters. That way, some inconvenience was introduced into use of the web site, but no material remained blocked for long.
From the start this struck me as a poor device for dealing with irresponsible internet users who might attempt to bulk-download large portions of on-line material. Taking arbitrary entries offline was inconveniencing all users who happened to need the blocked material. And happily, bulk downloading was an uncommon pattern of use according to my analysis of web site traffic.
If the problem was the user who wants to own a snapshot of the web site but, to avoid purchasing the CRC book, downloads major portions of the web site's content, then why not inconvenience only those exhibiting such patterns of use? So I began to improve my monitoring and access system. By mid-1999, I felt that the software I had written was able to detect and prevent attempts to download large bodies of material. So I removed the letter-based access restrictions altogether.
I was now morally certain that no online user could, in effect, get around CRC's rights to be sole provider of comprehensive snapshots of the web site. (In addition to the printed book, CRC had agreed to market a CD-ROM version--a snapshot with its own advantages and disadvantages compared to a book. I had prepared the CD-ROM; CRC duplicated it and promised to promote it.)
Eric Comes to Wolfram Research
In the meantime, a representative of Wolfram Research had invited me to visit its Champaign headquarters and speak about my mathematical web site. I traveled to Champaign in February 1999, presented my work, and shortly thereafter was delighted to be offered a position with Wolfram Research.
I had for some time admired Wolfram Research's support of long-term efforts to collect and disseminate mathematical knowledge on the internet through a collection of information-rich web sites. And I was enthusiastic about the possibility of working for what I knew to be the world's premier technical software company.
As my postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia neared completion, I purchased the "www.treasure-troves.com" domain name and moved my web pages from the university address at which it had resided to a commercial internet-hosting site. Throughout this period the math treasure trove was accessible to the public and free of charge.
I began work at Wolfram Research on June 1, 1999.
Stephen Wolfram and others suggested that the web site ought to give its users the ability to locate information based on a custom-tailored subject classification. A number of Wolfram Research staff joined me in developing an intuitive and powerful new graphical user interface that greatly enhanced the usefulness of the burgeoning content of the math web site.
In December 1999, Wolfram Research and I unveiled the enhanced web site, now renamed MathWorld and located at mathworld.wolfram.com.
CRC Fails to Promote the Book
When the book was first released, CRC promoted it with what I thought was some vigor. However, as the months passed I grew increasingly disappointed with their efforts. Less than a year after its release, the book ceased appearing in CRC mailings that I received, including special ones for its "Most Popular Math Titles."
I was also greatly disappointed that CRC had raised the price of the book twice within its first year, from the original $65, to $79.95, to $99.95. This seemed to undermine our original strategy of keeping the price low enough for students to afford.
And it appeared to me that CRC had done little to get the book into bookstores. In fact, to date, I have only seen the book carried in a single bookstore: the campus bookstore of my highly atypical alma mater, the California Institute of Technology.
Accordingly, on February 15, 2000, I sent a note to Mr. Stern:
"I've recently noticed a few signs which seem to indicate CRC is not doing an optimal job of publicizing the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Math. I was hoping you could reassure me: (1) I just got the CRC "Best of Math" flier. To my surprise, my encyclopedia is nowhere to be found. (2) amazon.com has been listing the book/CD-ROM combo as out of print and back-ordered for about 4 months now... Would it be possible to have someone contact amazon.com and find out why they think the combo is on back order? (3) I never heard back from you about the color direct mail flier which was supposed to go out promoting the [CD-ROM--erroneously written as "book" in the original] (and on which I sent you comments last summer). Do you know if it ever went out, or did the flier just get dropped?"
Later that day, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. He told me that (1) because the encyclopedia had been out for two years now (actually, it had been out for less than 15 months), it was not considered a very high priority and hence may have been "overlooked" when creating the brochure; (2) CRC had decided to discontinue the CD/book bundle, though he could offer no reason for this decision; and (3) promotional fliers for the CD-ROM and bundle editions had never seen the light of day.
CRC Sues Eric and Wolfram Research
At the end of this conversation, Mr. Stern changed the topic. He told me that he had heard that my web site was now located at a Wolfram Research web address.
I told him that this was indeed true.
Mr. Stern said that something would have to be done about that.
I replied that I did not understand why the shift from the old web site to the MathWorld site should be a matter of any concern. Mr. Stern simply repeated that it was, and that he would have to inform his superiors at CRC. I did not know what to make of this, so I asked him to contact an attorney at Wolfram Research who I believed would be able to clear up any concerns.
On March 8, 2000, I was greatly surprised when, after returning from lunch, I was informed that a sheriff's deputy was waiting for me in the Wolfram Research lobby.
I was even more dismayed when he served me with a document naming me and my employer as defendants in a Federal copyright violation lawsuit.
This was my first and only communication from CRC since my conversation three weeks earlier with Mr. Stern. For the interested reader, here is a copy of the lawsuit filed by CRC. A complete list of case documents is also available, many of which make interesting reading and give a good feel for the attitude of CRC Press. A set of FAQs about the case is also available.
How the Tail Came to Wag the Dog
In their lawsuit, CRC claimed that the existence of the MathWorld web site "competes with and interferes and impairs with [sic] sales of the Concise Encyclopedia."
They sought monetary damages from Wolfram Research. From me, they sought "not less than the advance and all royalties earned by Weisstein"--everything, in short, that they had ever paid me!
Apparenly impervious to irony, CRC at the same time acknowledged in its own court filing that the book was the company's best-selling mathematics title! (This, one month after Mr. Stern had "explained" to me that my book was a back list item that I should not be surprised to see dropped from its promotional materials.)
Arguments that the web site was hurting sales of the book, in CRC's subsequent motion to force us to shut down the web site, were completely contrary to the facts as I knew them and as I had tried repeatedly to explain to Mr. Stern.
CRC claimed that "anyone can download MathWorld", and that MathWorld "supplants" or poses "a formidable threat" to the book. As explained above, I had taken steps to prevent large downloads; I knew from monitoring traffic at the web site that large downloads were in fact not happening.
And CRC also claimed, with a straight face, that "
This argument, in particular, confirmed my worst fears that CRC's representatives had never understood the nature of my web site. They were blind to the interests of the thousands of you in our online community who had helped expand and improve it. They seemed completely oblivious of the fact that without you, there might not have been a book worth publishing.
Wolfram Research and I were confident that CRC's factual assertions about the web site had no merit. But the law takes copyright very seriously. Language in my contract with CRC (that I had never construed in the way that CRC now presented it) apparently persuaded the Court, on October 23, 2000, to grant CRC's injunction, perhaps to create a strong incentive for Wolfram Research and me to negotiate a settlement with CRC. (It was clear to all parties that that original contract had flaws; in such cases, the best approach is often for the disputants to reach an out-of-court settlement by writing a new, clarified, contract. In effect, that is what has, at long last, happened.)
I simply could not believe what was happening. The interests of thousands of enthusiastic users of the web site were about to be sacrificed to the misperceived commercial interests of the company I had brought in to provide a printed version to the comparatively few users who might want a book. What I had conceived as a minor side activity was threatening to destroy the core activity at which I had been working for more than a decade!
Some Comments about CRC Press LLC
As the shock wore off, Wolfram Research and my first instincts were to reason with CRC. We were certain, based on feedback from readers of the web site, that their assertions about it were unfounded, that in fact it was generating book sales for them, not suppressing sales.
But when we attempted to present these facts, we found that there was no one from CRC press even listening. During the course of these discussions, the heads of CRC's book publishing and electronic publishing divisions both left the company. We could not get anyone to listen to arguments actually focusing on the marketing of books. CRC responses were overwhelmingly legal and contractual. When facts entered at all, they were simply repeated assertions that we were certain would not stand up to reasonable scrutiny.
We wanted very much to negotiate a settlement that would allow us to bring the web site back. We proposed what we thought were attractive arrangements that would benefit both companies. Our proposals were ignored.
For months, I could not imagine why CRC was behaving as it was. Why would a technical publisher not listen to one of its best-selling authors, and to his employer, the world leader in mathematical computation? Why treat us, instead, in a way almost guaranteed to alienate us? It seemed insane!
I have had to conclude, to my sorrow, that CRC--perhaps like many other publishers in our era of wild corporate acquisitions and conglomerations--is no longer managed by people who understand and love books, authors, and readers.
The parent company of CRC, Information Holdings, Inc., appears unashamed to treat information as a commodity to be exploited for short-term bottom-line cash, with no concern for long-term strategic planning. The goal of the CRC representatives seemed to be monomaniacal: to squeeze from Wolfram Research and from me as much instant and short-term cash as possible, using the lawsuit as a lever.
How self-defeating in an era of rapid technological change! Apparently uninterested in looking forward, building good future business strategies, here are publishers focusing instead on how to squeeze greater quantities of immediate cash from old "properties."
I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.
The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun being had among the CRC people we dealt with.
Settling the Case
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
In addition to its "instant win," CRC will be paid annually for books they don't sell, according to a formula that both sides have accepted--although we continue to believe that any past or future failure to achieve projected sales is far more plausibly attributed to CRC's abysmal marketing efforts than to any abuse of the web site by people who want to have and hold snapshots of its contents. But in this life we do what we have to do--and what we are willing to do.
There are a few other consequences of the settlement which are of interest to MathWorld readers. The first is that a copyright statement "© 1999 CRC Press LLC" (in addition of the © 1999-2001 Wolfram Research, Inc. notice) now appears at the bottom of MathWorld entries that have a corresponding article in CRC's printed shapshot. Despite the fact the I (or volunteer contributors) wrote these entries, that CRC Press did nothing to support their creation or the creation of the web site in which they appear, and the fact that they existed in the website long before they ever appeared in the printed version, the tail has truly come to wave this dog, and this copyright statement will henceforth be a constant reminder of this fact.
Another important change is that, as part of the settlement agreement, CRC Press will now be given permission to create editions of the printed book based on future snapshots of the website. As a result, CRC insisted that broad reproduction rights to all contributed material be secured. Furthermore, if we are not able to secure such rights, then Wolfram Research and I, at our own expense, must rewrite the entries in question from scratch for CRC to reproduce. This makes it extremely difficult for us to include any new contributed material on the website unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form. This form is endorsed by neither Wolfram Research nor myself, but as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to ask contributors to sign it. Since our goal is and always has been to provide your contributions on-line to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.
Thanks
After a draining personal ordeal lasting more than a year and during which the site was unavailable to readers, MathWorld is now back. We've even taken the opportunity to add a new streamlined graphical design, and also added a new feature in which important breaking mathematical news will be announced and described. I hope this will be useful to readers of the web site as a means for keeping tabs on what is happening in the mathematical sciences. Please feel free to contribute new results to news@mathworld.wolfram.com so I can pass the word along to others!
Wolfram Research and I have been and remain steadfastly committed to supporting the development of MathWorld. Wolfram Research has committed considerable resources to defend MathWorld against the threat of being permanently removed from the internet--an outcome CRC Press has repeatedly told us would suit it just fine. I am personally grateful for the support of Wolfram Research, and for the fact that MathWorld will not be relegated to an electronic trashheap. If you want to show your appreciation of the stand Wolfram Research is taking, please visit what I can do to help web page.
Finally, I would like to extend my sincerest thanks for your patience and support over this past year. I invite your continued partnership in my efforts to expand and improve MathWorld, as well as to support other efforts to gather and present educational information free of charge over the internet. Let's continue to together spread the wonder and beauty that is mathematics!
Regards,
Eric W. Weisstein
Encyclopedist
Wolfram Research, Inc.
November 6, 2001
Champaign, Illinois
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Now you're probably looking at my sig and thinking "what a shameless plug by a sleazy lawyer trying to drum up business." But I am primarily a litigation attorney. I can (and do) make a hell of a lot more money representing one side or the other in protracted, expensive misery-inducing litigation than I could hope to make by doing three-hour book contract consultations for legally-naive techno geniuses, even if half the people on /. became my clients. But I feel this sense of grief and waste often, even in dealing with my existing clients - I wish I could tell them: "if you'd gotten legal advice at the outset of this situation, or paid heed to the legal advice you did get, you wouldn't be in this pitched battle today."
Please, please, take this case as an example. Cut yourself some slack, and consult an independent lawyer before signing any agreements. Don't count on your "editor" for legal advice. Listen politely when someone says you can ignore all the fine print in their contract because it's just "boilerplate" -- then say, "yes, I know all that stuff is legalese. So I'm sure you won't mind if I have a lawyer look at it, and get back to you." Any reputable company will permit this, and even respect you for it. On the other hand, if they raise a stink, that ought to tell you something right there . . .
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
Someone better mirror it quickly...slowing down.
Okay. Gave a book company permission to print a snapshot in time of the website. Book company doesn't do much to promote the book. Said it was a bad seller. Turns around and sues the company who we worked for (who was aiding him with the website) saying it was their best seller. Gets the website shut down.
In the end, he settles with the publisher for what I consider some outrageous terms. Like the publisher can publish a snapshot of the site whenever they want. The website has to cary its copyright, and the book publisher's. Submitters have to sign the book publisher's copyright form. Anything that the author can't certify has to be rewritten.
Hate to say it, but even though his site is still running, he got horribly screwed in the end. [apologies for the pun]
"Of course, I'm still on the idea that math is really un-important in the computer industry =) But that's another story heheh. "
Tell that to the NASA Mars program.
[Note: I didn't read the article or anything, karma be damned]
I just read the word "Mathematics". . Oh it hurts..
ahhh!
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
In addition to its "instant win," CRC will be paid annually for books they don't sell, according to a formula that both sides have accepted--although we continue to believe that any past or future failure to achieve projected sales is far more plausibly attributed to CRC's abysmal marketing efforts than to any abuse of the web site by people who want to have and hold snapshots of its contents. But in this life we do what we have to do--and what we are willing to do.
Continuing to purchase from CRC would be unthinkable, but as I read this, it appears that a boycott of CRC would actually result in Eric and friends just having to pay CRC more.
So either way CRC wins.
The contract eric signed with CRC Press gives them an ongoing print copyright to the current and all future version of MathWorld. Plus he has to pay the company for books that they *dont sell*. All this from a boilerplate publishing contract?
If you thought the GPL was viral, you obviously never tried to publish a book. It looks like MathWorld can no longer be built upon without paying cash and giving privledges to some arbitrary company. Its a sad ending for someone whos goal was to provide unhindered math info to as many people as possible.
Couldn't this be grounds for a class action lawsuit by anyone who has submitted material to the math treasure trove before CRC got involved? One could probably argue that CRC's use of submitted material violates the spirit of submissions received prior to the CRC 'boilerplate' being put on the website.
I first learned of Mathworld last fall when writing some 3D code and searching Google for math info. Lots of links popped up which led to pages that were blocked. :(
It seems to me that this settlement sucks. I'd rather see someone recreate all of the material without CRC's involvement. That's a tough hill to climb but who knows what CRC could do in the future? And who would want to submit new articles to Mathworld knowing that CRC gets your hard work for free?
How about an Everything2 for Math?
a group of the original submitters (who never signed the CRC "boilerplate") were to sue CRC for copyright infringement?- it book.
It might nullify the contract between Weisstein & CRC, and lead to the demise of the book, but with an adequate number of mirrors - I think the wold is ready for the if-you-want-a-hardcopy-then-download-it-and-print
yes, we have no bananas
Let x = 1
x^2 - 1 = x - 1
(x-1)(x+1) = (x-1)
divide both sides by (x-1)
x + 1 = 1
2 = 1 !
The middle mind speaks!
Man, I have missed that site... it is (how sweet to use the present tense!) the best reference math site in the world.
Congratulations, Eric!
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
thank god it's back!
The bottom link on the left side of the webpage is great. Here it is:
t ml
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/crc_legal_notice.h
Check out the sarcasm on the the page. 12-point type, OK.
Thir customer feedback page
. as p
p
http://www.crcpress.com/us/custserv/cust_issues
Their Editorial contacts:
http://www.crcpress.com/us/Publish/edcontact.as
Chapman & Hall/CRC
Sunil Nair
Publisher
44-20-8875-4385 Mathematics
snail@crcpress.com
Bob Stern
(561)998-2549 Mathematics & Statistics
bstern@crcpress.com
Kirsty Stroud
44-20-8875-4386 Statistics
kstroud@crcpress.com
Electronic Publishing Division
Steve Wells
Director, Electronic Product Development
(561) 998-2557All CD and Web Projects
swells@crcpress.com
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Go check out this legal notice in lynx in an xterm with a really small font. :)
It's a wondeful site that I was missing a lot. Thank you Mr. Weisstein, for not giving up.
www.crcpress.com
- vent
- test their security
- try out your latest DOS attack utility
Naw. If you're bored, you can always fire off a few attacks against their domain to keep their admins hopping.
This is a really, really sad story. Eric created something wonderful, was a little bit incautious in how he tried to use his material, and ended up losing ownership of his own work. The worst part is that he has lost ownership not only of what he did, but also of whatever he or others might add to it later!
I can see why WRI didn't want to foot the big legal bill for fighting CRC; they don't really care about who owns the content of the site, as long as they can keep it up it will drive people to the web site, which will help them sell copies of Mathematica (an awesome piece of software, BTW, too bad I can't afford a copy -- it's not priced for casual users like me).
However, at the end of it all, Eric and WRI are in a situation now where if they produce more material (or if they accept reader submissions), they're actually adding value to CRC Press' ill-gotten gains! And that really has to rub them the wrong way.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to stop adding to it, and start another project whose ownership weren't in dispute? Sure, it would mean starting over, but I'll bet the whole thing could be reproduced in a couple of years, particularly if they were to GPL (or similar) everything to encourage submissions. According to the front page, it currently has just over 10K entries; if the project could convince a professor or two from each University in the world to submit a half-dozen entries, and if there were a little organization to keep them from overlapping too much the new site would soon eclipse the old.
Let WRI take down the current Mathworld and leave CRC Press with nothing but a set of dead pages to try to sell! Right now, according to Eric, CRC Press is shortsighted enough to find that an acceptable outcome. I suspect they'd change their mind over time, as the new site grew to eclipse the old and some competitor of theirs got to publish snapshots of the living, breathing #1 math resource on the web.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
To me, this means that this website is now proprietary. This is like what happened to the cddb, or SSH. Maybe it is time to start the equivalent of freedb and OpenSSH, and to replace Eric's website. Produce a website under a publishing equivalent of the GPL or the BSD source license.
Or is time to fork?
I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the web really doesn't maintain freedom of information even to the extent that copyrighted books do. Books, at least, have multiple copies made and websites such as bookfiner.com can find many very old and long out of print books that had only a small number of copies made. A website, in contrast, is rarely duplicated. If the author decides to shut it down, then *poof* it is gone for good. Or, if the web hosting service goes belly up and there are no backups, it is gone. Or, when the author dies, and their heirs don't care about it, it is gone. Or, the website uses lots of active pages, and the software breaks on a new release and the *owner* (not the surfers) don't one cares enough to fix it, it will be gone. Actually, it doesn't even have to have lots of active pages, just a few key ones.
There are many many books that you can buy today where the author, and everyone else, has found no interest in touching/updating for decades. These books may still be of interest to readers and historians though. That's ok, because books can just sit, but a website has to be maintained.
It isn't just copyright law that is the problem, the whole technology of the web is very centeralized and lacks redundancy. Even if it was declared tomorrow that you could freely duplicate any website you wanted to, few websites would actually be mirrored. And, of course, you can't really mirror the active web pages anyway.
So, what is going to happen when VA Linux (or whatever its name de-jour is) decides that /. isn't worth it and shuts it down? Sure similar websites may well pop up to replace it, but all the history that /. has accumulated will be gone. There won't be the equivalent of dejanews for /. to preserve the past.
CRC has told Eric that it really doesn't care if his website just drops of the net forever. One day, Eric and Wolfram are going to get tired of pay for it, and it will go away. It, and really most of the web, are just walking zombies. The web is worse that even ebooks because ebooks are at least duplicated and eventually (in 100 years or so), they may be able to be reporduced. Almost no website of today will still be here in 20 years.
In reality, Eric's website may well be one of the few that will exist 200 years from now because there will still be printed copies of CRCs books.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
We must remember that its not companies that ultimately screw with us, its people. Once people realize they cannot hide behind the corporate curtain, they will start acting more responsible. Granted, reading a contract is incredibly important but supplying a devious contract and calling its "normal, standard and harmless" is pure evil for an editor to do and unethical to the maximum. Rot in hell, Mr. Stern, you're name has been added to the list.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The short of it is, they caved to CRC and if you want to be a contributor, but retain all your rights, you can't be a contributor. 8^(
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and as usual it hurts. I wrote that comment without knowing the whole story.
I was naive enough to think that Weisstein had won the case and that everything was back to the way it used to be. But no he has to pay to continue his life's work and everyone who wants to contribute has to agree to an awful contract with the bastards that took the site down. Is there no justice anymore?
Am I correct in thinking CRC is big in mail order? If that's the case, instead of just boycotting them, take the time to fill out an order form, but don't include a check or credit card number, instead, include a note saying you will not complete the order until they release their unjust copyright stranglehold.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Buy mathematica (wolfram's sweeet math proggy)
Purchase the second edition of the book, but NOT directly from CRC
write a positive testimonial in the guestbook to help their applications for funding.
Let's take a look at the facts. According to the account, it seems the author started the fight long before the CRC filed the lawsuit. First, the author gave the content to Wolfram Research, possibly in exchange for a job. This fundamentally changed the nature of the website from a private enterprise that could support the book to a Wolfram branded resource. One must ask if the book was of any further interest, or if the real goal was keeping the boss happy.
Second, the author complains about lack of promotion 15 months after the book is published. How useful is this book a year later? Many CRC publications are revised yearly. I would think this would especially critical for a snapshot of a website. This again begs the questions about the author's confict of interest between the book promoted by CRC and the website promoted by his boss. There is no reason for CRC to waste ad space if the author is not interested in selling it.
Third, the author complains about the price, citing concern with students. Well, from my experience the best way to help students is to have yearly updates of the book. This encourages a healthy resale market. CRC has always charged the most the market could bear. People who need the resource have paid that price. Student can buy an older copy of fraction of the retail price. Nothing changes so fast that a student needs a spanking new latest book. I used a copy of the math reference that was older than I was. Frankly, I would not have cared if the book were $60, $100, or $150. Any optional book over $20 was out of my reach.
Again, it is not my intention to malign anyone. I just think that all these attacks on CRC publishing are uncalled for. I don?t know for sure why the CRC sued, but it seemed the author did give them plenty or reasons.
I couldn't be happier. This incredible encycolpedia of mathematics got me through not only a number of intimidating math courses (linear algebra, graph theory, diff-eq, etc.), but also through many hours I would have otherwise just spent reading slashdot or memepool. Finally I can go back to spending hours on end at a website actually learning something worthwhile ;). This is definitely something I won't take for granted in the future. Congratulations again, Eric! Keep up the good work!
Steven N. Severinghaus
I am not a mathematician, and thus probably have very little use for this individual's collection of knowledge. Still, I can recognize it as being a valid and valuable resource to those that are mathematicians, or who are studying math. Even though I am neither, I suppose there may even come I time where I might want to use this resource.
Reading Eric's Commentary about what happened to MathWorld - I can't help but think that in then end, he and his employer got screwed - and HARD. As part of the agreement between them and CRC, they have to continue to pay, and to allow other's information passed on, in one form or another (either original form in which the author agrees to CRC's boilerplate agreement, or in a rewritten form, which Eric or his employer must rewrite the submission) to CRC for future publication!
Which to me, is an outrage! It is like having to pay to have your own ideas, past and future, to be sold for a profit, but not EVER seeing the fruits of that labor.
Personally, if I was Eric - I would say "Fuck CRC", appologize to the math community - and PULL THE SITE. However, this really hurts all parties involved, because this has been a "labor of love" for Eric, and a valuable resource for the community. So, what could be done?
I haven't had a chance to see how big the site is, but from the stats written, I would imagine it is fairly hefty. He has software in place to keep people from downloading large chunks of it at once. I tend to wonder if there isn't a way to set things up to get the site rewritten, and put on another site, called something else, and then given back to Eric as a gift. I mean, if ten pieces were rewritten by one person, how many people would it take? Could this encyclopedia be folded into one of the "free" encyclopedias out there?
In a way, what I am proposing is kinda something akin to how tax dodgers work - setting up a front company, then disolving and moving the money to another new front company not affiliated with the first (or something to that effect). Could such a thing be done with information? What kind of legal ramifications would there be? If Eric and others rewrite the entire site - is it still the same site, legally? Something tells me yes and no.
CRC needs to be taught a lesson of the power of the internet - the reason it exists. It isn't for money, but for information, and the love and exchange of that information. If it is possible, we can make it happen.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It doesn't give them exclusive rights to anything at all. Now wasn't that what the original hassle was about, them trying to grab exclusive rights?
Of course this is not exactly like the GPL either, because it is just a license to them, not the whole planet.
Now that would be a good idea, to GPL the site.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Were the copyrights to the original contributions by various people signed over to Eric somehow? How were they assigned to CRC? Could those contributions still be the property of the contributors? Could they be contributed elsewhere?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
If a continuous function defined on an interval is sometimes positive and sometimes negative, it must be 0 at some point.
Funny, this seems almost intuitive.
Question for anyone willing to answer.
Is their a physics world out there? I need more help with physics than I do with calculus
Hit CRC where it hurts. Contact your local University/College and talk to the Math dept. people. Ask them to not support CRC Press...
http://br.crashed.net/~akrowne/crc/math0.htm
My post to http://www.crcpress.com/us/custserv/cust_issues.as p
(label : suggestion)
Just a small message to suggest
that you do no spend too much time
on your web site as you certainly
alienated any potential user
(maths enthousiasts and web users)
with your mathworld fiasco.
I,for one, will NEVER buy anything from crcpress.
Not only that, by I will
instruct co-workers and students
to do the same.
CRC Press proved to be harmful
to mathematicians, let's hope
it will disappear after
realizing (but too late)
that it's not cash, but writers
and readers that makes an
editor.Nice PR move, indeed !
Amazing. The site gets pulled just at the point in my degree where I really need it for some form of iterative method of solving something or other, now, just when I reach the point in my degree where I'll never need to do that *ever again*, it reappears!
Fate, it seems, doesn't like me solving differential equations the easy way.
--
Windows XP. From the people who brought you Edlin.
Don't get me wrong. Mathworld is a great resource. Eric did an enormous amount of great work putting it together. Unfortunately, being the work of a single person, it is and always will be limited in very important ways.
First off, all of the treasure troves always seemed very idiosyncratic. Since they represented only what the author felt was important / had access to / had time to write up, this was inevitable. Particularly amusing in the chemistry treasure trove which manages to be mostly useless to a college chemistry student while still bothering to include the mineral names of a great number of inorganic compounds.
The math treasure trove, by virtue of its sheer size, eventually escaped the worst effects of idiosyncrasy, but it still suffers from covering topics it varying levels of detail utterly out of proportion with their importance in mathematical study.
Despite all this, in its day, mathworld managed to be an enormously useful resource. However, even before it was shut down, it was beginning to totter under the effects of being (mostly) a one-man project. Despite the solicitation of "contributors," who did write a small fraction of the entries, Eric took a great deal of pride in having put the treasure trove together, and in his management of the treasure trove project, ensured that outside contributions would never be a substantial enough part of the project to threaten his claims to absolute control over it.
And absolute control was definitely one of his priorities. Mathworld was protected by some of the most stringent anti-mirroring measures I have seen. If the web server thought too large of fraction of the archive had gone to any IP or group of IP's, they banned the entire network. With a few rare exceptions, such bannings were without appeal. Yes, this meant that if someone else at your school attempted to mirror mathworld and got caught, you were banned from it until if and when your sysadmin managed to make nice with Eric.
I don't deny that Eric, being the author of almost all the material in the treasure-troves, had the right to do this. However, these policies forced me to reevaluate my opinion of him. Whereas before, I considered him a great altruist, I came to realize that offering mathword free to the public had no altruism in it at all -- it was simply a business decision to amass personal fame and publicity for his product, which he never intended to give to the public to use in any way he did not intend. Mathword, while originally free as in beer, was never free as in speech.
This is the great irony of mathworld's downfall: Because Eric never allowed anyone to have substantial collaberation in or to mirror the site, when it fell, the only way to get the information was off of a few illicit mirrors created from the CRC CD, and even then, Eric and Wolfram still shut down any mirror they became aware of. Again, I don't blame him for doing so -- it was his work. It just caused me to reevaluate the spirit in which the work was put together.
I now hold Eric Weisstein in about the same esteem as RMS. Both created a wonderful thing, but in time, their respective egos became one of the larger barriers to that thing acheiving its full potential.
What direction should mathworld have gone? What resources are there that attempt similar things in better manners?
First off, there is http://planetmath.org, a collaborative attempt at becoming what mathworld should have been. All contributions are under a public license of sorts, so it is immune to what befell mathworld. It is, however, still in its infancy. Go there, contribute, and fix that.
Second, there is http://www.mathforum.org, which has been bounced around from being a project of the Stanford math department, an independent dot-com, a subsidiary of WebCT, and now finally a not-for-profit sponsored by Drexel University. This is not an encyclopedia, it is a question and answer service for K-12 math questions. Because it is entirely volunteer-staffed, though, it actually answers whatever questions the volunteers feel like answering, and as a result, has amassed an archive of answers to math questions ranging from the most basic to graduate-level topics. In its current incarnation as a not-for-profit and with the site licnesed to print the authors' work with the author's retaining ownership, it should last as long as Drexel pays for the web space. I recommend that anyone who is interested volunteer as a Math Doctor to help enrich the site.
These two sites, I feel, far better embody the open-source spirit than mathworld, and in time their potential vastly exceeds anything Eric Weisstein will ever manage (mostly single handed). I bear no ill will towards Eric. I greatly respect his work. I just believe that the paradigm and motive it was compiled under are now obsolete, though it took the CRC morass to make me realize that.
Tell that to the NASA Mars program.
Why? Will they beat him up for suggesting that math is unimportant to the computer industry? You specified the Mars program, are they known to be more violent than other divisions of NASA? I am working on my M.S. in Mathematics, what sort of initiation can I expect if I want to join their gang? Would I have to kill an English major on the pretense that he was disrespecting me?
I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.
The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun being had among the CRC people we dealt with.
And then he blisefully continues in the very next paragraph:
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
Hello ? If Wolfram is such a bunch of privately owned old-school in-it-for-the-fun boys, how come the cash approach won ? What happened to all the stuff about short term versus long term ? Didn't do much good to be free of all those "uninvolved stockholders", now did it ?
I used Mathematica in school, and liked it. From now on it's Maxima only, however. Long live the GPL.
That only gives them the right to publish it without paying you, but they still have to give you credit for it. It's a non-exclusive right at that. If you're going to submit something, you need to understand you're essentially releasing it into the Public Doman. I think you can get away with the Open Content license, because it doesn't violate the terms of the permission form.
"I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders."
The above is a very good reason to NOT go public. One can only wonder how much of a mess the present business climate is, because of the above not being the norm?
They may be helping Eric now since it benefits them, but if I've learned anything watching WRI, it's that they'll turn the project loose once it's been exploited for all its worth.
I'd include a URL to the Wolfram alumni page, but it's my understanding that the owner was forced to remove it by WRI's attorneys.
If you read the agreement, you'll see that they aren't going to accept submissions from people who don't sign their rights over, so that they don't have to go through the trouble of reproducing them if CRC wants them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You have to read the whole document, not just one paragraph. The contract spesificaly didn't allow the author to work on anything that could compete with sales of the book. Since CRC believed (erroneously) that the website hampered sales, they have the legal right to pull the site.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Man, what a pack of jerks. I hope that this incident is widely reported, and that CRC never gets a chance to screw over another author.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of course, mathematics _is_ complicated. Eric is very good at explaining complicated things quickly to people with no previous mathematical education. You must read serious mathematical books for weeks to learn basic ideas or you can find the same in MathWorld in an instant. I was a regular user of MathWorld for several years. The Mathworld is an excellent piece of work, I deeply admire Eric for creating this.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to stop adding to it, and start another project whose ownership weren't in dispute? Sure, it would mean starting over, but I'll bet the whole thing could be reproduced in a couple of years, particularly if they were to GPL (or similar) everything to encourage submissions
Unfortunetly, the contract dosn't allow him to work on anything that could harm CRCs book sales. So while Wolfram Research could do new site, Eric couldn't work on it. Which would suck.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It sounds like he's whining to me.
Yes I got the impression that CRC is both mean and stupid but you haven't heard their side of the story. Maybe they fully thought that this guy was selling them nearly all rights to the info and now he's reneging.He also says they never contributed anything. Um, sorry, but they paid him for it. If you build a car and sell it to somebody you don't then complain that "they never contributed to the creation", you were paid, they bought it, it's now their's, you have no more rights as you SOLD THEM.
It sounds like sour grapes to me. If I didn't want to sell all the rights he should have made sure that's what the contract said. He was not asked to sign the contract without reading it, he was given the contract, it said CRC gets XY and Z in exchange for $$$. He then irresponsibily agrees without checking what he's agreeing too. It's not like CRC put a gun to his head and said "sign RIGHT NOW without reading or else!".
Then he gets upset that they asked for damages. Hello? He did do something which he was PAID NOT TO DO! Let's see, you sign a contract that says "I will not do X so you will give me $$". You get $$ and you do X anyway. Who's in the wrong here?
You can see what he signed. It's in plain enough English that you don't need to be a lawyer to understand it
He gave them ALL RIGHTS in ALL MEDIUMS. He even sold them rights to revisions!!! What did he get for that?
Read section 6 of the contract for his compensation.
Sorry but the a**hole here is really this guy for legally selling his rights to CRC in exchange for money and then reneging on the deal. And then having the gaul to try to frame it as CRC being the bad guy and convincing all of you guys that he's the innocent one.
I've signed a few programming contracts before and I've had to explicitly exclude my libraries of routines (separate from the stuff specific to the project) from being considered part of "the Work" that I'm providing the company in question.
One time my contract said something like "...except for stuff detailed in exhibit A...", me, being naive, thought that I could skimp on detailing out exhibit A because I "trusted the nice people at the company". Fortunately the person at the company I was dealing with pointed out to me that the cool people at the company at the moment may not always be there and *less nice* people might replace them so DETAIL IT OUT!!
Eric really got screwed by this ordeal. CRC now owns his life's works, and is basically using his life's continuing work as a means to profit because he signed a contract that he didn't read. After settling out of court, CRC now requires you to sign away your contributions to them so they can have further rights from the continuing development of Eric's life's work. This is wrong on so many levels.
The only appropriate, mature response is to inform the world. If every one of us takes some time and visits Eric's work, now back online for free via the internet, and gains some benefit from it, then it will do Eric justice. I'm NOT recommending contributing to CRC's wealth (i.e. DON'T BUY IT), but let all your peers and superiors know about the story. Give them the link: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/. Propagate the wealth of his knowledge, but don't support CRC in doing so. Let everyone in the academic world know loud and clear that CRC is a company out to stop the free and convenient exchange of information.
What Eric produced was a collection of information. What he wanted was for that information to be available offline for an affordable amount, and what CRC did was to trick Eric into letting them declare ownership of all future developments that Eric or the thousands of contributors added to Eric's life's work of collecting facts, and subsequently sue Eric for continuing its existence. Everyone on the planet should be touched by this story and the greed of the CRC corporation that tricked an information provider to give away all rights to develop information.
There are other things you can do. If you recently bought a CRC book, you can return it. If you have a website, make a page about the story. If you have used MathWorld, continue to do so online only. Promote MathWorld through awareness of the vast resources that Eric has gathered, but always tell people not to buy the book because the CRC publisher screwed over the source of the information. MathWorld was one of the greatest resources ever compiled, and the fact that CRC has claimed ownership over the entire work should anger each and every one of us. Especially Eric who created it, and the thousands of people who contributed to it. Spread the word by email, snail mail, telephone, IM, talk, groupware. Tell your politicians, teachers, professors, educators and students about the wonderful resources and how the CRC company got the collector of this vast amount of resources to sign it away to them, sued him, and how he didn't make any money off of 10 years worth of hard work. Make Quake clans with the name CRC Sucks or equivalent to remind yourself when you relax that CRC Sucks.
If we were to try to compile as complete a resource of Mathematical and Scientific knowledge as Eric did, it may take a long time, but I would recommend that if this were to be done, the organizer of such information create a disclosure agreement similar to the CRC agreement you have to "sign" when you submit to MathWorld, with the exception that you are copyrighting this information and reserving no rights. I'm no lawyer, and don't have the expertise to do this, but I bet that people from the Free Software Foundation do. Free as in speech, free as in beer. Let's contribute to an organization with the founding principle that the information we contribute is not our protected property, but rather, that the information is public knowledge. I'm just a recent college graduate/software engineer who feels terrible for Eric (his work helped me pass Differential Geometry), and wishes that we could do something as a whole.
Feel free to use any portion of this message that you see fit for any purpose.
-Anonymous "I sold my brain to a company, but this guy didn't, and we should spread awareness of CRC's foul play." Coward
(I'd like to keep my personal information private and free from spam. If that makes you take my comments less seriously, so be it.)
Why do we call people that do this victims instead of what they truely are: stupid.
We make legal agreements precisely so that both side clearly know what the agreement is.
We sign them so that both side point to what the agreement was and that the other side agreed.
How can you blame someone else if you failed to read the contract?
If you can't understand what it sais then offer a counter proposal or get professional help explainging it.
If your laywer does a poor job explaining it then sue him for damages.
But please don't call yourself a victim because you are just plain to lazy to read it or to stupid to think that it might not be in your interests.
Many thanks. This is how the internet is supposed to work.
At last i find about Mandelbrot
Site bookmarked
How much sympathy do you have for someone who runs unsigned email attachments? That's how much sympathy you should have for Eric Weisstein.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Insanity is a risk you take when you become a mathematician. It is probably the old saying, genius is close to madness, ie you have to be slightly, or more, crazy to be a genius.
Off the top of my head, Nash, Goedel, and Cantor are some big names that had some mental health issues. eg Goedel in his later years believed that someone was tyring to poison him, and so would not eat anything unless it had been tested by his wife. He also locked himself inside, too paranoid to go out, and too paranoid to allow visitors.
I guess it is the price of genius. Though there are some other greats like Gauss, Euler, von Neuman that managed to stay sane. Although poor von Neumann died at an early age due to a brain tumor.
Hilbert came up with the formal axiomatic method of mathematics. I wanted to be able to show, without any doubt, and without any ambiguity, that there were certain mathematical truths that could not be violated. He wanted everything to be black or white. Godel ruined all of his fun by writing this down:
"This statement if unprovable."
Unprovable is defined as not being able to prove using the axioms of Hilberts formal system. This was just the beginning of incompleteness. Turing followed up years later with the Turing Machine. He wanted to automate the Hilbert process, and proved the same results as Godel, known today as Turing Incompleteness.
Math as many know it is not absolute or complete. Most mathematicians chose to ignore that inconvenience and still plug away with Hilbert formalism.
p.s. My first post was a joke. Unfortunately, my login name and the absurdity of the whole thing didn't sink in. Kids these days.
The middle mind speaks!
One might want to consider that CRC is not the only ethically questionable player in all this. To me it rings slightly hollow to read text like
without recalling that the maintainer of the website intended to make money from generous input of so many visitors to his website. I'm reminded of the schism that created FreeDB from CDDB (now Gracenote) because Gracenote did something similar with CD index contributions.
Perhaps people should consider not contributing anything without getting something out of it that would be as valuable to you as moneydownloading content in bulk, perhaps? I don't know what that would be for everybody. Please spare me the mediocre wiseacre response of "You obviously didn't consider that before you contributed.".
raresilk,
You claim, if not sympathy with Eric Weisstein, at least a share in the community judgment, to wit:
1. CRC is behaving despicably.
2. CRC's behaviour is perfectly legal.
With your own expertise in these matters, could you not propose an amendment to existing US legislation that would bring 'legal' and 'just' closer together in cases like this one?
I'm sure some hard-working US Senate staffer would love to find a practical fix available for perusal.
That's not a joke.
{bait}Or perhaps you'd rather leave things as they are, and cluck sympathetically at the victims whilst their fees line your pockets.{/bait}
I have contributed several little things to the website over the years. I never signed over my copyrights. CRC therefore owes me royalities. The letter will go out soon. Maybe I can find a crappy lawyer who takes on the case for 70% of the settlement?
I would suggest that anyone who considers submitting to the new site uses "special" variable names, like
crc = press * (sucks)^2, etc.
Just a thought.
Don't Panic...
Who mentioned violent? ass.