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
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.
Damn slashdot effect takes it right back down. :)
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
www.mathworld.com seems to work, instead of the other link. Seems so obvious too.
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 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
It strikes me that if this in fact what happened, then the CRC was crassly trying to remove free-as-in-beer competition through a frivolous lawsuit, by claiming to own a copyright on the basic physical and mathematical constants.
So, to answer your question, it does relate to your rights, because it's yet another story about how well-monied corporations try to restrict speech on the net by suing those who speak in ways they don't like, and hoping that the financial burden of pursuing the suit will cause the speaker to give in.
If that doesn't make it clear for you, then I suggest you put up a large and well-documented website devoted to exposing abuses of corporate power by some large and litigious corporation (Walmart, Sony, any of the big names will do), and see if you feel empowered when you get the first letter from their lawyers.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
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
Trust me, if you ever want to publish in dead tree format something you maintain online you need to read this guy's story.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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"
> I'd rather see someone recreate all of the
> material without CRC's involvement.
It's another example of how the Internet is
a vast resource, but not very deep.
Why is there only one resource like this?
Why aren't there dozens, or even thousands of alternatives? There have been far too many
good things that had a single point of failure
(OLGA, Napster, DejaNews...)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
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.
Mathworld is a encyclopedia of Mathematics. If you needed an algorithm of formula, Mathworld was the place to go. At one time, CRC press bought the right to the site and began to publish it as the "CRC encylopedia of Mathematics" (or a similar name). While useful, the book also cost 95$ and was large and somewhat heavy--both traits that in my mind, limited its appeal (in comparison to a freely aviailable internet site.) CRC sued to remove the site as it probably dimisnished sales of its "Encyclopedia of Mathematics."
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?
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."
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
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!
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}
Sorry, but please read the whole contract as well as the court's ruling on the injunction. The work is defined as the typeset pages, not the source documents of the website. However, the court ruled that the typeset pages were the same document as the website. On Page 11 of http://www.ilcd.uscourts.gov/00-2262.pdf the judge says, "It is entirely feasible for one to read the contract and assume this language refers only to the encyclopedia due to the vague definition of Work." Period. If CRC were behaving honorably, they would have quit right there. Since CRC can't tell the difference between a website and a book, what are the odds they are going to survive the digital age? Zip.
Walt
Couldn't mabye some of the other people who contributed to the site before they made a book out of it sue CRC Press, since they probably never got signatures from all of the submitters? a few hundred mathematicians bringing lawsuits against them might teach them a lesson.
Best Slashdot comment ever
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...