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

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:

[Spy Hunter]

What a horrible ending! CRC is the big winner here. By threataning to bring a lawsuit they probably wouldn't win they have won all sorts of money and rights to the intellectual "property" contained in MathWorld. This case shows as plain as any I have ever seen the problems with our legal system.

Re:wee bit 'o whoring:

[Speare]

From that page, here is the meat of the settlement, which is far from a "win" by Wolfram and the site's creator:

• 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.

I understand not having the financial resources to fight such disastrous suits, but I really wish more light was shed on this issue BEFORE the settlement. There is a whole world outside Wolfram Research, and perhaps such a fight would have been possible if more people knew it was necessary.

Re:wee bit 'o whoring:

[interiot]

Not only that, but the settlement requires contributors to make the same mistake that Eric unknowingly made in the first place (contribution permission form here).

Check your contracts BEFORE you sign them.

[Svartalf]

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.

Boycott CRC

[chrisatslashdot]

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

Next time: put the /. effect to good use

[ethereal]

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.

the moral of this story . . .

[raresilk]

It is really sad that a researcher who appears to give so much to the community had to spend so much time and effort struggling out of a legal morass. Based on his published account, I certainly agree that CRC behaved in a shameful and abusive matter, regardless of whether its position on the contract and copyright issues was legally justified. However, may I take this opportunity to suggest that if the author had invested a relatively minor amount of time and money in consulting a lawyer prior to signing his book contract, the protracted litigation and consequent much-greater expense might well have been avoided.

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 . . .

Re:Boycott CRC, but give them some feedback too

[garyrich]

Thir customer feedback page

http://www.crcpress.com/us/custserv/cust_issues. as p

Their Editorial contacts:
http://www.crcpress.com/us/Publish/edcontact.asp

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

Mixed blessing, Read this before celebrating!

[ackthpt]

On the surface it seems like a good thing, until, while reading this commentary, you get to this part:

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 web site. 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 web site unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form.

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^(

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.