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."

Comments

Good Math Sites

[matth]

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.

wee bit 'o whoring:

[Xzzy]

Since slashdot apparently has zero stories detailing the ordeal that this guy went through other than saying "closed because of copyright issues", here's a shiny direct link to the owner's writeup of what happened.

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..

Re:wee bit 'o whoring:

[aka-ed]

Thanks to chrisatslashdot, memphis.edu has a mirror; just in case, though -- here is the final chapter, told by Eric W. Weisstein:

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.

Finally, some Good News!

[ibirman]

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.

Re:Why is this under "Your rights online" ?

[Rand Race]

If you write a book (or make a movie, website, etc) you can claim copyright, therefore copyright is one of your rights. That the particular copyright in question is not yours is irrelevant as this can easily be construed as affecting everyone's potential right to protection of information. Just because you chose not to excersise your rights doesn't mean you don't have them.

Trust me, if you ever want to publish in dead tree format something you maintain online you need to read this guy's story.

Re:CRC

[ttimes]

You should read Eric's account of the case. It is quite a testament to Eric's vision and commitment to mathematics but also to the voracity of business. Though CRC did not prevail in court, they got money out of this and the rights to all future submissions. All this for data they don't own! What was Eric's fine maths site has now been co-opted into an information gathering point over which lawyers hold sway. AND, here comes the wrought irony, if you do contribute, you have to agree to the same ambiguous boilerplate contract that suckered Eric in the first place. Thank Eric and Wolfram for their commitment, but wear garlic when around CRC.

Time to fork the website?

[wayne]

I have used Eric's website since before he went to Wolfram, and I was really pissed when it went off the net. Eric has managed to bring it back, but in such a form that it appears that CRC will continue to receive income from the mear existance of the website, and will now be allowed to publish books based on the future changes.

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.

Re:Mixed blessing, Read this before celebrating!

[Sir Spank-o-tron]

No. You can be a contributor without signing your rights away. Instead, your submission will be rewritten from scratch, and that version will be given to CRC. In effect, your work is worthless at that point.

so sad...

boilerplate data

[Alien54]

the annoying paragraph is:

By indicating your consent to this permission request you consent to the following uses of your Contribution: the non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual and irrevocable license without compensation of any kind to Wolfram Research, Inc. to exercise all rights under copyright in all media and formats, for the full term of copyright, and all renewals and extensions thereof, including without limitation, the right to reproduce, publish, sell, and distribute copies of works containing the Contribution, selections therefrom, and translations and other derivative editions based upon such works, in print, audio-visual, electronic, or by any and all media now or hereafter known or devised, and the right of Wolfram Research, Inc. to license or authorize others to do, license, or authorize any or all of the foregoing throughout the world.

IANAL, etc. and maybe I need more coffee, but there is nothing in here that says that you cannot use your own stuff. It just says that they can use your stuff and you will not hunt them down and sue them about it after the fact.

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 took mathworld's absence...

[shimmin]

... to make me see its obsolescence.

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.

Oughtn't our laws protect good not evil?

[jonathanweaver]

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}

Let's start demanding royalities

[AxelBoldt]

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?