Sweet, Sweet Mathworld Is Gone 180
Jon Wild writes: "Eric Weisstein's online encyclopedia of mathematics, originally located at http://www.treasure-troves.com among Eric's other encyclopedias, and most recently hosted by Wolfram Research, has for some time been the most complete and reliable mathematical resource on the web. Now Wolfram has yanked it due to a lawsuit by CRC Press, the publishers of a print edition of the encyclopedia. See the announcement at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."
Re:So very sad (Score:1)
Re:Time to start harvesting the Google Cache? (Score:2)
They have every right to expect a fair profit from a book they have contracted, but this is ridiculous. In my email I suggested that a better strategy would be to ask Wolfram to insert a small ad for the printed book on the site. I for one didn't know it even came in a printed version.
I really hope this gets resolved. It was one of the Internet's better points of reference.
-John
Re:Outrageous (Score:1)
In a related note, mirrors, although a nice gesture, will probably only hurt the author, who did not take this site down voluntarily. Also, flaming the author won't win you any marks, not even moral outrage ones, because he is fighting this also.
Patent Mathematics (Score:1)
In fact, the benefits are so obvious that it would even be worth some brib^H^H^H^Hinvestment in the effort to make sure that patents on basic mathematics can be obtained and enforced.
I care! (Score:1)
So Hilbert proceeded with his program to formalized mathematics. He black-listed Brouwer from the popular society of mathematics, and then Hilbert failed. Brouwer claimed that a linguistic formalization of mathematics was silly, but it wasn't until quite some time later that Godel [st-and.ac.uk] proved that Hilbert's program to formalize mathematics was absolutely impossible.
Because our schools teach us a history of wars, as opposed to a history of men who actually did society a great service, we have people who know little to nothing about what math is and why we have it and who helped along the way. Also, because Hilbert and followers were more popular than Brouwer and intuitionists, schools continued in the tradition of Hilberts inherently flawed program.
The mathematics that you were taught in school was most likely this flawed approach. That would explain why you believe that mathematics is a "language" - you were taught such. Now, it is up to you, to correct your understanding of something which was incorrectly taught to you. Taught to you as a formal language of symbols with a finite set of rules that you had to memorize -rules which govern the movement of these sybmols, rules which are then applied to the symbols, in order to generate new theorems.
Mathematics is a purely mental occupation, where you create exact and perfect ideas in your mind. These ideas, most likely, do not exist in any true sense, outside of your mind. Because we are all limited in the quality of memory, we use formal symbols to aid in our mental constructions. Because no man has ever communicated his soul, his mind, directly with another man, we use formal symbols to aid in a form of crude communication of our perfect and exact ideas.
I believe, that once people understand what math really is, they see the beauty.
Re:who cares? (Score:1)
But anthropology is considered a science and deals with humans. Same with sociology. I'm not sure whether I'd consider mathematics a science or not, but the dealing with humans aspect is irrelevant.
Re:who cares? (Score:1)
Re:Idea: Free Version (Score:2)
IIRC, they can't copyright a mathematical formula, they can only copyright the words they use to explain it. Should be possible to copy all the formulas you want, but provide your own explanations.
Re:Scientific prestige and dead-tree publishing (Score:2)
Would you rather gain prestige with the old crowd (who will be dead in 20-30 years) by killing trees, or with the young crowd (who will still be in their prime 20-30 years from now) by making valuable information available for free with frequent updates? Which is the investment in the future and which to the past?
Re:who owns what? (Score:1)
How do you get royalties for something that doesn't sell? That's the intended result of a boycott, correct? Not buying something. You can't get royalties from something that nobody buys. And if it doesn't sell, it doesn't get published any longer. Usually, if an author wants money from one of his/her published works, he/she encourages people to buy one. If you tell people not to buy one, the royalty checks stop coming in.
CRC's phone number: 1(800)272-7737 (Score:1)
Re:copyright infringment ? (Score:1)
>its diffusion by patenting its presentation.
CRC didn't patent it's presentation, they copyrighted it.
While the facts and theories presented by Eric's encyclopedia were public domain, the manner of presentation of those facts and theories is copyrightable by both law and precedent.
This is probably why they were suing him. The only way to decide if his encyclopedia was too similar is to let the courts decide.
(Of course, as usual, IANAL)
Re:CRC Contact info... (Score:1)
Re:crc (Score:1)
Re:Mirrors ? (Score:3)
Were there any mirrors ?
This is precisely why I make local copies of several of my favourite reference sites and put them on CD. I'm sick and fucking tired of sites disappearing on me when they were a great resource. I've got stuff from 1992 hanging around somewhere, just watiting for the time when I need that bit of information that I had the instinct to back up before it disappeared from the face of the local BBSes.
Maybe I'm just an information packrat but I'm sick to the teeth of shit disappearing on me. The pages of the 'net need to be written in indellible ink.
Reversal of Justice (Score:2)
This very summer a began writing my proof for one of those $million math problems. (Which one, I am not yet willing to disclose, but you'll likely hear soon!) It took only two weeks to "see" the solution, but four months to type it up in a format that is useful to math journals. (That four months included teaching myself the LaTeX layout language from scratch.) Already written into this proof is a grateful acknowledgement to Weisstein and his contributors for the resource provided at mathworld.wolfram.com .
I almost bought the CD edition before this news broke... but now those guys are costing themselves another customer! Eric Weisstein will get his acknowledgement whether or not this is resolved. It is for authors, not distributors, that the incentives of copyright were created. If the publishers' hunger for money only costs themselves sales, it will be poetic justice.
Mathster! (Score:3)
Then us math junkies and scientists could get our Math for free. We would also be screwing the onerous, monopolistic Math empires who sell Math at egregiously high prices, and profit off of poor, starving mathematicians who are stuck with terrible contracts.
Remember, Math wants to be free!
Vive le Math!
:)
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D. Fischer
CRC Press not completely clueless? (Score:4)
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
That's the *whole* book. I know everyone will flame CRC for this, on the assumption that if they do this one thing that looks pretty stupid, they must be entirely clueless, but here is at least one example of them not being the embodyment of evil.
my 0.02,
Mike.
No other resource... (Score:1)
The funny thing about all this is that a lot of the contents was added by visitors of the web site. It was (in some part) an "open documentation" project. It sucks that they've taken it off the air. But now I feel there's only one possible next thing to do, and that is to go out and buy that (very very very expensive) encyclopaedia, it will cover most of the web site's contents, but won't have all the other "open" submissions and hyperlinked structure.
This is indeed a sad day...
Anthony,-
DMCA. It's a four-letter word. (Score:2)
Regardless, why is it the obligation of the accused to remove the content until proven innocent?
(IANAL) If an ISP deletes potentially infringing content first and asks questions later, DMCA says it's 100% immune to liability.
This seems somewhat backwards to me...
So does the rest of DMCA.
Re:Mirror the whole web ... on Google. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Not much (Score:1)
They don't want your feedback but ... (Score:2)
Every second faceless corporate website I look at seems to provide next to no contact details for anything other than "Order Enquiries". CRC's website [crcpress.com] seems to be one of them. The only email even remotely close was orders@crcpress.com so I've sent them off a polite message telling them that I am a both a book nut and a technical person and that I will never buy another one of their books ever if they proceed with this lawsuit.
In the meantime I'm doing my bit through google's cache like has been suggested.
CRC fools (Score:3)
Whatever happened to migrating toward 'paperless environments'... Is all of U.S. laws driven by one simple motto - greed, and nothing but?
Sad, it truly is... patenting knowledge, patenting one-clicks, copyrighting knowledge that's been there in excess of 200 years, patenting the sound of the Harley-Davidson... what's next? Patenting quarks because someone proved they're there first while working at Mega-greed-corp. Inc.???
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Re:who cares? (Score:1)
But anthropology is considered a science and deals with humans. Same with sociology. I'm not sure whether I'd consider mathematics a science or not, but the dealing with humans aspect is irrelevant.
Dealing with humans is nessecary for being a humanities. It could be that it's not sufficent for being a humanity, or that some subjects (like the two you mentioned) are both sciences and humanities, but that doesn't affect the fact that math is not a humanity.
Note I didn't say whether math is a science or not. The world isn't disectable into sciences and humanities.
Anyone have a copy of it? (Score:1)
When will companies realize that having stuff available online is more advertising than anything? I would have never have heard of the actual book if I hadn't found the web version on google. I was tempted to buy a copy before, but not anymore.
Re:Scientific prestige and dead-tree publishing (Score:1)
Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more brownie points in scietific cicles for publishing anything on dead tree than publishing it online. Even if neither version are peer-reviewed, the dead-tree version counts for more. It doesn't matter that the online version is of higher quality or have more readers.
It is also more accepted to quote from dead-tree sources than from online sources, which is a further incitament for authors to publish on dead tree.
About quoting; Assume that you are reading a paper which then references eg. Mathworld. At the moment, you're crapped. There's no way anyone can verify your claims. Paper has not only stability, but there is also very large framework for locating the information.
You need to do more than just put your findings on a .tex-file on your homepage. That's almost equivalent to having the only hardcopy on your own bookshelf. There are on-line mathematical archives, though, which provide electronic math articles, and I'd love to see that become the standard (in addition to journals and conferences, naturally.)
Online texts are useful in some situations, but extremely annoying in others. Personally I prefer my math as a book when the issue is more than one or two pages. Printed .pdfs and .pses just won't cut it. And the prestige is something; even I, a 21-year old CS student (ie. an information highway roadwarrior), would be excited about getting my stuff in a Book. Any old fool can throw stuff to ~/public_html/...
Despite my luddite feelings, I think Mathworld was one of the most best sites on the whole web. I had thought of sending some entries there, since I ran into "Become a Contributor" -buttons once too often :) Now... we'll see. I hope and believe the site will come back on-line, but until then I'm doing math the hard way.
Re:about wgetting mathworld (Score:2)
But, if you can browse it, we can have it. eWatch goes to extreme lengths to defeat such measures by any normal standard, but give me the teeming millions of bored sysadmins with a perl or python interpreter, a /29 or better to their name, and some desire to do it and we can make 'em look like the pikers they are.
If everybody who frequented the site with any regularity makes a tarball of their browser cache RIGHT NOW, probably including summary database files, and we get those collected someplace we can surely reconstruct the site. In fact, how's this: Somebody whip up a program to comb your browser cache for, and save out, URL's matching a pattern. Put it on freshmeat, get a followup posted here, and I'll volunteer to at least collect the results and attempt reconstruction.
Or we could wait a few days until the site comes back on its own, at two words and 30 banner ads to the page and all new "intellicast.com"(TM)(R)(F-'em) type delivery assurance tricks.
robots.txt forbade spiders (Score:1)
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ had a robots.txt file at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/robots.txt (now changed) that forbade spidering of the site except by a few specific search engines (including Google, which is why they have its pages cached). Not only that, but there was a legal page at the site that explained that any IP address that downloaded pages in bulk would have its entire subnet banned. You could not mirror this site. I don't think anybody has an offline copy of it.
The original robots.txt file was identical to this [treasure-troves.com] one. Also see this similar legal page [treasure-troves.com].
Re:who cares? (Score:1)
It is often called "The language of science" it is a way of describing things in very precise terms.
However - it is not very different from some branches of philosophy. Come up with some ideas of a base system - certain unprovable fundamental definitions (like "a point is a single position, and takes up no space") and then use those as the rules and dervie whole new forumlas to describe everything.
-Steve
Re:Idea: Free Version (Score:2)
I have it in hardcover and sometimes open it up to a random page and read just for fun. For example, Eric's story of Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most enjoyable, complete, and also concise descriptions I have ever read, and it's also totally accessible to someone with only a small background in math. Amazing!
Re:copyright infringment ? (Score:1)
Padark
Re:Mirrors ? (Score:2)
Sad day indeed (Score:1)
Re:A Great Loss (Score:2)
Re:Contributors assigning copyright (Score:2)
[...]
I didn't keep a copy of the form, but I'm almost certain that I assigned copyright over my entries to CRC.
I hope you don't mind my asking, but why? A freebie book is a pretty cheap price to put on something you contributed to an effort to build a useful public resource.
Re:Outrageous (Score:2)
does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created??
I dunno. Maybe you should ask Frank Zappa, Aimee Mann, and Don Fogerty about what it's like to be sued by the very company that sells your music. In Fogerty's case, he was accused of plagarising himself.
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Distribution with a Lithsp! (Score:1)
Why be a copyright thSlave when you can be its Mathster?!?
Color me THERE!
Mirrors ? (Score:1)
If not, is it still possible to make some from stuff people have downloaded ?
Anyone in a country who couldn't get sued - set up a mirror !
It's a shame (Score:1)
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You are right (Score:2)
I can't imagine how you can replace the CRC handbook of physics and chemistry, but for math I suggest documenting and contributing to the GSL [redhat.com](GNU Scientific Library).
Re:CRC Press not completely clueless? (Score:1)
Of course, since a certain Washington based operating systems company has been dragging its feet on releasing 1.2, that last feature might not be so important.
copyright infringment ? (Score:2)
Come on : Science is Public Domain.
There's no valid ethical reason to restrict its diffusion by patenting its presentation.
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Re:No other resource... (Score:2)
Re:copyright infringment ? (Score:1)
Re:CRC Press not completely clueless? (Score:1)
* OpenGL Red Book
* OpenGL SuperBible (1st edition)
* Thinking in C++
* Thinking in Java
All of them are also available on the dead tree format. I'll leave as an exercise for the readers to find out where they are.
Re:who owns what? (Score:5)
How so? Does calling for a boycott of your publisher negate their obligation to pay your royalties? Is this something written into these kinds of contracts?
This reminds me of something. I have a professor who has co-authored a niche book about computational solutions of partial differential equations. The book sells for over $100. He says he gets only a few dollars per book sold, and that it has sold in the low thousands, although it has become canonical for advanced post-graduate study in the field. It was written in TeX, although the publisher had it re-typeset when it was published (since typesetters need to get paid), and thus, MANY errors were introduced.
Basically, we talked about it in class, and I asked if the monetary compensation was worth all the frustration, or whether he would rather have just published the TeX source on the web, where the errors were fewer, and could be updated. He thought about it and said that, in retrospect, the money wasn't worth it, and that he would have preferred to just publish his correct, up-to-date version. The prestige of publishing an accurate version of such an important work, would likely more than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just in increased consultation fees.
Something to consider, if you plan to publish a book for a small niche.
Re:Outrageous (Score:1)
What if some site that hosted gpl'd code written by other people were to make a book using that code and the publishing company tried to shut down that site. Would the gpl be the only thing protecting the material or would the writers of the code have a say about when and where the code could be published.
Eric "owns" it (but not really) (Score:4)
Eric sold the rights to the Math treasure trove to CRC, although I'm not sure what the terms were.
*However*, the treasure trove was built up over many years and largely user-contributed. So it is not clear that Eric had claim to the rights in the first place. It's much like the CDDB case.
how to fight all this (Score:2)
These days, it seems that American capitalists have embarked in a struggle against the free flow of information on the Internet, by filing lawsuits, "inventing" new on-line services that you have to pay for, etc. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but this could lead us one day to a proprietary Internet where the only free information is the advertisements.
We all know that the best way to get rid of all this nonsense is to host free content and services in countries other than the U.S. and the core E.U. This will also have the wonderful site-effect of boosting the education level of the people of such countries. Imagine mirror farms in paces considered by many as "third world", serving knowledge to the entire humanity. Free software, free education, free books, music and movies, free communication for all.
Unfortunately, no one has done this at a large scale, yet. Why? Don't know. The only thing I know is that if I had some money (to set up the servers and buy an E1 line) and some help, I'd be glad to do it myself.
Anyone interested?
skillos@yahoo.com
Dang (Score:1)
On the other hand it still has the physics and other sections there (am meant to be learning about thermo right now..). Hopefully these sections won't get pulled as well (before I get a chance to read them at least).
Re:I care! (Score:1)
What is a language? It is a set of rules that governs ideas. You can use a language to communicate with others - ie I can write symbols (which are no different in function than the alphabet for crepresenting english)
A language is completely mental. It exists in your mind. I use english to think about how I feel, or about what I want to do. I make sounds which represent things in the language - to communicate to others. Again - the sounds are not the language - they are just a means by which I can transmit my thought and ideas another.
Math is a language of description. It is purely logical. The "Laws" and "potulates" are like rules of grammar - telling us how to use the symbols - how to form our thoughts.
-Steve
Re:You are right (Score:1)
- Steeltoe
Re:copyright infringment ? (Score:2)
IIRC, the Beatles stuff is now owned by somebody else than themselves.
You can't copy a Mozart CD as the interpreter still own its interpretation.
Concerning the Math stuff here, it is obvious most mathematical concepts' authors (who might be quoted in this book) are dead and thus won't sue anybody.
So, CRC owns the "structure" and can plaid a plagiarism.
I agree, but I can't accept it except if (I have not checked) they did introduce some revolutionary and proprietary way to demonstrate these to their readers.
So, I just say here that it is somehow sad.
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Re:Time to start harvesting the Google Cache? (Score:2)
A politely worded commemnt to him may have better results.
Mathematicians shouldnt have to put up with this (Score:2)
CRC just screwed up with me, a potential customer. I wont buy their works now, It is to the copy machine with them. And I can, legally, because I have that educators umbrella over copyright law. Too bad for you CRC. Besides, the CRC didnt even think up their work, like physical constants to 9 digits.
at least it's reasonably priced. (Score:3)
$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not something that was popular enough to
be De-CsSed and mirrorred around the globe
*before* this happened. It's up to the community
to make it impossible for this to happen.
Well, what I mean is, Weisstein could have
complied with the order without the web losing
the resource altogether.
Screw the web for publishing. It's not free enough, in it's current form, to be revolutionary.
Somebody invent the next thing please. You know,
the thing that makes the Web of today look like the Web makes the internet before 1993 look. Or something.
Re:CRC Press not completely clueless? (Score:2)
Also it might help if some of the contributors to the mathworld website made it known to CRC that they wanted a say in how their contributions were distributed.
Re:who owns what? (Score:3)
Royalties are based on the number of books sold, no? If there is a boycott of the book, fewer copies will be sold, no? So you will get fewer royalties, no? So, encouraging a boycott of your own book/publisher hurts you financially, no?
I could explain it again if you want....
Relating to open-source textbooks, there's a very good, anti-copyrighted text on applied mathematics here [caltech.edu]. It was written over the author's many years of TAing the required applied math course at Caltech.
Also... (Score:2)
Re:Mirrors ? (Score:3)
Idea: Free Version (Score:3)
One solution, it seems to me would be to set up a similar website, with each useful equation taken from a source other than CRC. Ie derive it yourself OR better yet, look in an old math book for which the copyright has expired, perhaps one in Germany or something.
I realize this requires work, but if everyone supplied one equation..... Well just a suggestion...Disclaimer: I never got to see the site sadly....
Really too bad for student. (Score:2)
I was using this site as a primary text for the graph theory class I was taking. It was much less obtuse than the textbook for the course (it's always good to use more than one source anyway).
Math students everywhere are feeling this pain!
--8<--
Re:who owns what? (Score:2)
The idea was to eliminate typesetting-introduced errors.
Funny that history repeats itself, again, and again, and again...
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Contributors assigning copyright (Score:5)
Going back to who owns the copyright of the individual entries, a lot of entries on the properties of sequences of integers [mathsoft.com] were submitted by Steven Finch of MathSoft. Steven still maintains a website with this material on, so I wonder if CRC will start chasing him? (Maybe he has a separate agreement with CRC, though - I don't know.)
Incidentally, some academic journals in mathematics allow for authors to have an electronic version of their papers on their homepages. The AMS [ams.org] is one example, where you will often see in the copyright notice on a paper `copyright retained by author'. A lot of other journals turn a blind eye. (As you might expect, the copyright notice in the CRC Encyclopedia is the standard `it's ours so hands off' one: no reproducing or transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, etc etc.)
My own feelings are that the best place for the encyclopedia is on the web. Some of the entries are mathematically wrong, and many are misleading. This is not a criticism of Eric, who obviously put a lot of work into the project, it's just a fact that a book containing so much material will contain many many errors. (See the (often extrmely rude) posts from about 5 years ago on sci.math.research complaining about the lack of mathematical precision in the treasure trove!) Having the treasure trove on the web would and should have allowed the project to grow, both in terms of the accuracy and the number of the entries. Sadly, the only way that such errors could be corrected in the printed version would be for CRC to issue a second edition - something I would imagine Eric is now unlikely to want to get involved in...
Re:Time to start harvesting the Google Cache? (Score:2)
To: Bob Stern <bstern@crcpress.com>
To: David J. Packer <dpacker@crcpress.com>
To: Cindy Carelli <rpowers@crcpress.com>
CC: Eric Weisstein <e.weisstein@wolfram.com>
To CRC Press:
I am extremely disappointed to hear that the MathWeb site has been taken down due to a lawsuit filed by CRC press. This website is a treasure -- one which I browse from time to time in order to expand my mind, and to which I have referred curious high-school students. I believe (though I have little but my own convictions to go on) that this wonderful site can only HELP sales of the book version CRC published, by making a great number of people aware of its existence. I also believe (and I am much more sure of this, as I will play my own role in it) that the bad press and poor public opinion that CRC earns by closing down a site as well-respected as MathWeb's will FAR outvalue any possible increased sales of this single book.
Finally, I would argue that even if you DID hope to profit from this lawsuit, that it is nonetheless inappropriate on purely moral grounds. A resource like Eric Weissteins MathWeb should be made available to every middle-income black child in South Africa, every underpaid inner-city Chicago schoolteacher, and every assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton -- of the three, only one has a realistic opportunity to purchase your book.
I sincerely hope that you consider these issues and decide to withdraw your suit against Eric and others, allowing MathWeb to be reinstated. If you do so, please write me at mcherm@destiny.com to let me know.
-- Michael Chermside
Re:Greed... (Score:2)
I hope mathworld wasn't already violating... (Score:2)
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Re:Outrageous (Score:2)
John was sued because his later works were similar, not neccessarily plageristic, but sytlisticly similar. i.e., you could tell they were works by John Fogerty.
It's as if Mark Twain were sued for writting and publishing Huck Finn by the publishers of Tom Sawyer.
hosting site not relevant (Score:2)
It doesn't matter whether it's hosted in your office, or in the Cayman Islands. The lawyers aren't going to try to physically shut down your server. The lawyers are not usually even going to call your hosting company. They're going to send you a cease and desist, and your corporate lawyers will say "better listen to them".
Besides that, this isn't some great moral crusade. This is a published book that the author wanted to distribute online, probably (I'm assuming) in violation of his contract with the publisher.
Wolfram should pay CRC (Score:3)
Wolfram is after all a commercial enterprise, and obtains considerable publicity and prestige from the publication of the material; it would be unreasonable to expect CRC to allow Wolfram, a rival publisher, to benefit from this without benefit to itself.
Re:Eric "owns" it (but not really) (Score:4)
Yep, ok. The first part (Eric licensed the rights to CRC) was stated on his website (http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/ [virginia.edu]), which used to advertise the book. The second part is clear because his website has (or always used to have) a request for entries to be contributed on those areas of maths which are not yet covered.
BTW AFAIK CRC always "tolerated" the treasure trove being online, at least in the days when Eric used to randomly block 10 letters of the alphabet (so, e.g. the entries for words beginning with A,G,K,L,N,P,S,T,V,Y would be unaccessable). I guess they've just decided to have a problem with it now that he's (apparently) working for Wolfram.
Re:Greed... (Score:2)
That said, the Treasure Trove project was a Herculean effort, and I really loved his work. I don't blame him for "selling out", I'm just saddened that things worked out the way they did.
Re:at least it's reasonably priced. (Score:2)
>$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
>only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
>free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not about price. The two great thing about the site were that you could link to it from other pages, and that you could contribute to it. You cannot link to a printed book. I guess CRC may give you some deal that if you pay them extra, you can put some parts of the cdrom online and make them available to your students on a password protected page or something. Even if they let you make them available worldwide, it is still a static, non-developing text.
The great thing about MathWorld was the centralized encyclopedia where you could contribute, add things, correct things and so on.
With a book on CD, you will always have to wait for new CD, and pay for it, to get updated version.
Re:Outrageous (Score:2)
More than anything, I think that we need a good bit more info on the CRC lawsuit. "Existence of a threatened lawsuit" isn't a whole lot of information to work off of, and that's all I can get from the appology at the wolfram site.
ominous rumblings
If, as some people have said, the wolfram site didn't have any pointers to the CRC site, I would expect to find that this problem has been brewing for quite some time. I mean, what author wouldn't provide pointers to his (supposedly) royalty-generating publisher from his very popular web site? There needs to be a reason for this, and I doubt that it's going to be pretty.
If we're going to respond intelligently to this incident, it would be valuable to have some more info on the real history of this dispute. It's much easier to ride a horse if you know which way it's pointed.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:who owns what? (Score:2)
Cool. You can get student-written course notes, from the Cambridge maths degree course, with varying free-ish licenses from http://www.cam.ac.uk/Ca mbU niv/Societies/archim/notes.htm [cam.ac.uk].
Never transfer your copyright (Score:2)
Time to start harvesting the Google Cache? (Score:5)
Particularly troubling is the fact that at least some of the content was contributed by people who most likely intended it to be online where others could get great benefit from their work. Did they give away ownership by contributing?
And finally, where can we direct our well written statements of objection to this action by CRC?
Re:who cares? (Score:2)
It is obvious that a scientific theory can't be proved because tomorrow, a new experiment could be performed that would disprove the theory. This happens all the time in science -- old theories are thrown out almost daily; what was thought to be true is now thought to be false. In math, however, once a theorem is proved it is true forever. The two fields can't be more different.
Re:Outrageous (Score:2)
After all, the website is a free competition to the book! Who would buy the book when it was available for free online?
It's drekky logic. I would buy a copy of Encyclopaedia Brittanica in dead-tree form even though an inevitably more accurate version was available on the web.
I am not always near a phone line, and my skills at liberating access are (REDACTED).
Tell CRC what you think! (Score:2)
Rich O'Hanley [mailto]
Christian Kirkpatrick [mailto]
John Wyzalek [mailto]
David J. Packer [mailto], Publisher
Cindy Carelli [mailto]
Gerald Papke [mailto]
Nora Konopka [mailto]
Bob Stern [mailto], Publisher
Sunil Nair [mailto]
Kirsty Stroud [mailto]
Bob Stern [mailto]
Barbara Norwitz [mailto]
Becky McEldowney [mailto]
Carol Hollander [mailto]
John Sulzycki [mailto]
Fequiere Vilsaint [mailto]
John Lavender [mailto],
Bill Feldman [mailto]
Chris Richardson [mailto], Director
Arline Massey [mailto],
David Packer [mailto],
Drew Gierman [mailto], Publisher
CRCweb_feedbaca [mailto]
Or here are the raw addresses for cut and pasting into your mail program.
rohanley@crcpress.com
ckirkpatrick@crcpress.com
jwyzalek@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
rpowers@crcpress.com
gpapke@crcpress.com
nkonopka@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
snair@crcpress.com
kstroud@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
bnorwitz@crcpress.com
bmceldowney@crcpress.com
chollander@crcpress.com
jsulzycki@crcpress.com
fvilsaint@crcpress.com
j.lavender@uk.crcpress.com
newsdiv@crcpress.com
crichardson@crcpress.com
amassey@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
dgierman@crcpress.com
jlavender@crcpress.com
I have not yet sent my own letter (I will in a few minutes), so please do not blame me if any of these bounce. Enjoy.
Thad
The full story? (Score:2)
Contact info for CRC Press (Score:2)
Rich O'Hanley [mailto]
Christian Kirkpatrick [mailto]
John Wyzalek [mailto]
David J. Packer [mailto], Publisher
Cindy Carelli [mailto]
Gerald Papke [mailto]
Nora Konopka [mailto]
Bob Stern [mailto], Publisher
Sunil Nair [mailto]
Kirsty Stroud [mailto]
Bob Stern [mailto]
Barbara Norwitz [mailto]
Becky McEldowney [mailto]
Carol Hollander [mailto]
John Sulzycki [mailto]
Fequiere Vilsaint [mailto]
John Lavender [mailto],
Bill Feldman [mailto]
Chris Richardson [mailto], Director
Arline Massey [mailto],
David Packer [mailto],
Drew Gierman [mailto], Publisher
CRCweb_feedbaca [mailto]
Or here are the raw addresses for cut and pasting into your mail program.
rohanley@crcpress.com
ckirkpatrick@crcpress.com
jwyzalek@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
rpowers@crcpress.com
gpapke@crcpress.com
nkonopka@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
snair@crcpress.com
kstroud@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
bnorwitz@crcpress.com
bmceldowney@crcpress.com
chollander@crcpress.com
jsulzycki@crcpress.com
fvilsaint@crcpress.com
j.lavender@uk.crcpress.com
newsdiv@crcpress.com
crichardson@crcpress.com
amassey@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
dgierman@crcpress.com
jlavender@crcpress.com
I have not yet sent my own letter (I will in a few minutes), so please do not blame me if any of these bounce. Be polite, but do not pull your punches. Enjoy.
Thad
what about contributers? (Score:2)
While most contributors will probably accept a parallel print version to the project they contribute to, I can't imagine they would be happy if the original purpose of their contributions, to share it with the community on the web, is not honored anymore.
Does anyone know whether these people have any legal rights? Shouldn't they get part of the royalties? Could they sue CRC to take out all passages contributed by them unless it is published again openly? It would seem to me as though it is impossible to take such a work of many people out of the public domain without either completely rewriting it or getting everyones permission...
Scientific prestige and dead-tree publishing (Score:3)
> of such an important work, would likely more
> than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just
> in increased consultation fees.
Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more brownie points in scietific cicles for publishing anything on dead tree than publishing it online. Even if neither version are peer-reviewed, the dead-tree version counts for more. It doesn't matter that the online version is of higher quality or have more readers.
It is also more accepted to quote from dead-tree sources than from online sources, which is a further incitament for authors to publish on dead tree.
Eric (Score:2)
Anyway, this is really a tragic loss. Maybe we can convince CRC Press to open-source Calculus? Then Richard Stallman can calculate the area under his curves.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Re:who cares? (Score:2)
Re:Never transfer your copyright (Score:4)
who owns what? (Score:3)
The print edition is titled the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, which implies that CRC either takes great pride in publishing it or owns significant rights to it. Eric Weisstein is prominantly listed as the author, which implies that he was either hired to edit it or sold them rights to publish it. So, the question is:
Who owns the Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics? Did CRC Press hire Eric to edit it, or did he approach them to publish it, and, if so, did he give them copyright (or any exclusive rights)?
If Mr. Weisstein owns it, his publisher dosen't have a legal leg to stand on unless it was granted exclusive electronic rights to the work. On the other hand, if it does have exclusive rights, CRC probably has the legal right to force the site down, regardless of whether it's morally right. If, when CRC bought the right to publish the Encyclopedia, it also bought the copyright, then Eric Weisstein is differently (and more) screwed unless he retained certain rights when transferring ownership. The most he can do is stop updating the work, start working on a new encyclopedia of mathematics, and encourage a boycott of his publisher (which will hurt him financially - he won't get any more royalties from the sale of the current book).
Government should pay for such resources (Score:2)
This looks like a job for... (Score:2)
Man, will HC ever go live so we can stop reading about all these precious web jewels being trounced upon by lawyers?
- JoeShmoe
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Scientific papers on line (Score:2)
I'm not sure who holds the copyrights on this stuff, though; the ability to publish on line might be a part of the agreement when you have one of these journals publish your stuff, or they might just do it anyway and nobody complains because it's so useful.
-Erf C.
Re:CRC Press not completely clueless? (Score:2)
Re:Scientific papers on line (Score:2)
Re:who cares? (Score:2)
Interesting post; I wish I had moderator points.
There's a stereotype that geeks don't do humanities, because they don't like anything that involves shades of gray or requires evaluating alternatives from multiple viewpoints. The fact is that most of the passionate arguments geeks engage in (C vs. C++; GPL vs. BSD; Closed Source vs. Open Source vs. Free Software) are exactly the kind of multifaceted and nuanced issues that you are supposed to need advanced humanities training to tackle.
Contrary to the stereotype, geeks have the intellectual equipment to address the humanities, and in many cases may have important practical knowledge to bring to bear on issues.
Re:Greed... (Score:2)
Well, folks do need to eat.
Programmers don't have to worry about people copying their work, because programs are never finished and there will always be somebody who needs is willing to pay for something to be added. The more free copying, the more revenue opportunity.
Writers have a tougher time. The more free copying, the less revenue.
Re:They don't want your feedback but ... (Score:2)
The trend these days is that ALL customer (and esp. potential but as-yet-unrealized) complaints can be completely ignored. Your best shot is somehow convincing Marketing that there's a problem in which case they'll bring the matter up interally.
I myself have noticed this: in the last year I've written two letters describing real problems with service, one to Columbia House for botched Babylon 5 tapes (one episode has 6 minutes of footage missing, another has one episode repeated) and Men's Warehouse (describing a rather horrific shopping experience). In both cases, I have heard nothing, nada, zero, despite following up each letter with another letter asking why there had been no previous response.
Using e-mail to send feedback has become even less satisfying - if you hear anything back, it's just a form letter drafted by the lawyers and marketing to say nothing, but to cover their trail that they have a XXX% response rate.
What needs to happen is that the lack of principles needs to be faulted as vocally as the lack of service. At present they have the upper hand because they control the situation - take the situation out of their control and the problem will be attended to much sooner.
Sick Irony (Score:2)
Unless CRC claims to have invented some of the math contained in their volume, which could not have been profitably produced without the protection of their copyright.
Mirror the whole web ... on Google. (Score:2)