on Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 05:29:03PM -0600, Jim Choate (ravage@ssz.com) wrote:

http://slashdot.org/yro/01/11/06/2028252.shtml

Big Biz sues helpful guy, and somewhat wins. Eric's side of the story is here: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/erics_commentary.html Exerpts: What Happened to MathWorld It is no secret that one consequence of the explosion in the popularity of the internet and related electronic technologies is that many battles will be fought over how information is created, stored, and accessed. It is equally clear that we all have a stake in how these battles are decided. Below is an account of one such battle--the lawsuit served on me and Wolfram Research in the spring of 2000 by CRC Press LLC, a publisher that generations of scientists used to know as the Chemical Rubber Company. This lawsuit was instigated by CRC Press after I had contracted with them to print and distribute a "snapshot" of my math web site in book form. My goal in recounting how that contract went awry is to give others an opportunity to learn less painfully what I have learned--especially about the deep cultural divide that appears to be opening up between most, but I hope not all, book publishers and their potential customers and authors. In particular, many publishers seem unable to understand a new generation for whom dynamic web sites are rapidly becoming a primary medium--sometimes coequal with books, sometimes preferred over books--for gathering, extending, and sharing knowledge. [...] How MathWorld Came to Be I began collecting the material now found in MathWorld when I was in high school and continued the project as a college student in the late 1980s. As I collected the material, I stored my notes on my state-of-the-art Mac Plus personal computer and started sharing my collections of math and science facts with friends. "Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics," the predecessor site to MathWorld, first went online in 1995 when I was a graduate student in planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. As the site became more widely known and used, dozens of contributors offered new entries. Hundreds of others from around the world offered technical advice, criticism, and kind messages. The web site was in a constant state of evolution. It was a hugely rewarding experience. The growing volume of comments and submissions from the diverse community of users made clear that what had started as a labor of love for me was becoming a major math and science resource for thousands, just as I had hoped. The Book: A "Snapshot" of the Evolving Web Site As the web site grew, I came to believe that a snapshot of its contents in printed form could be useful. I myself do not always have a computer at my fingertips. A book would also make the material accessible to precollege educators and people less comfortable with (or without access to) the internet. (For some of you it may require some imagination to conjure up the dark ages of 1995, when web browsers were in their infancy and email was hardly the mass phenomenon it has since become.) [...] Tales of warm friendships between famous authors and their longtime editors are legendary. I imagined that publishers must have a natural interest in retaining the good will of their authors, especially authors of works likely to be revised and reissued in new editions. When CRC agreed to publish the book, I therefore gave limited scrutiny to the boilerplate [38]publishing agreement they provided--especially since my editor, Bob Stern, characterized the contract as "very straight forward [sic] and easily understood." He assured me that its language and terms were standard in the publishing business. So I signed it. Lesson #1 (Where have you heard this before?): Never sign a contract until you feel that you understand and agree with, or at least accept, every clause in it. If you are not sure of the meaning or implications of any phrase or provision, find a lawyer experienced in your kind of project and take the lawyer's advice! (This lesson should be read repeatedly and committed to memory.) Also consult with authors' organizations, and make use of helpful online resources such as Wilfred Hodges's [39]mathematical copyright web page, a public page devoted to copyright issues in mathematical publications. CRC's agreement defined the contracted "Work" as "approximately 1400 camera-ready manuscript pages and includ[ing] approximately 1200 camera-ready illustrations to yield a completed work of approximately 1408 printed pages[.]" I understood this to mean that I was assigning to CRC the right to publish the typeset camera-ready text I had offered them. The Web Site and Its Relationship to Book Sales In late October or early November 1998, as the book adaptation neared final production, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. Throughout this pre-publication period, my web site had been receiving a great deal of attention. I had posted on the web site an announcement of the imminent appearance of the CRC book; that announcement appeared to be generating a significant number of pre-release sales for the book. I thought things were going very well. But now Mr. Stern was on the phone asking me to remove portions of the web site content in order to create greater incentives for online users to purchase the book. [...] So I told Mr. Stern that I felt the web site was, on balance, creating sales for the book, not suppressing them. I was very reluctant to restrict free access to any contents of the web site. However, in November 1998, against my better judgment, I began to comply with Mr. Stern's request. At first I did this by randomly choosing a set of letters of the alphabet each day and blocking all entries starting with those letters. That way, some inconvenience was introduced into use of the web site, but no material remained blocked for long. [...] I began work at Wolfram Research on June 1, 1999. Stephen Wolfram and others suggested that the web site ought to give its users the ability to locate information based on a custom-tailored subject classification. A number of Wolfram Research staff joined me in developing an intuitive and powerful new graphical user interface that greatly enhanced the usefulness of the burgeoning content of the math web site. [...] CRC Fails to Promote the Book When the book was first released, CRC promoted it with what I thought was some vigor. However, as the months passed I grew increasingly disappointed with their efforts. Less than a year after its release, the book ceased appearing in CRC mailings that I received, including special ones for its "Most Popular Math Titles." I was also greatly disappointed that CRC had raised the price of the book twice within its first year, from the original $65, to $79.95, to $99.95. This seemed to undermine our original strategy of keeping the price low enough for students to afford. And it appeared to me that CRC had done little to get the book into bookstores. In fact, to date, I have only seen the book carried in a single bookstore: the campus bookstore of my highly atypical alma mater, the California Institute of Technology. CRC Sues Eric and Wolfram Research At the end of this conversation, Mr. Stern changed the topic. He told me that he had heard that my web site was now located at a Wolfram Research web address. [...] On March 8, 2000, I was greatly surprised when, after returning from lunch, I was informed that a sheriff's deputy was waiting for me in the Wolfram Research lobby. I was even more dismayed when he served me with a document naming me and my employer as defendants in a Federal copyright violation lawsuit. [...] How the Tail Came to Wag the Dog In their lawsuit, CRC claimed that the existence of the MathWorld web site "competes with and interferes and impairs with [sic] sales of the Concise Encyclopedia." They sought monetary damages from Wolfram Research. From me, they sought "not less than the advance and all royalties earned by Weisstein"--everything, in short, that they had ever paid me! Apparently impervious to irony, CRC at the same time acknowledged in its own court filing that the book was the company's best-selling mathematics title! (This, one month after Mr. Stern had "explained" to me that my book was a back list item that I should not be surprised to see dropped from its promotional materials.) Arguments that the web site was hurting sales of the book, in CRC's subsequent [43]motion to force us to shut down the web site, were completely contrary to the facts as I knew them and as I had tried repeatedly to explain to Mr. Stern. [...] And CRC also claimed, with a straight face, that "[44] ...the public will suffer no injury from a preliminary injunction because the Encyclopedia will continue to be available without interruption, from CRC Press". This argument, in particular, confirmed my worst fears that CRC's representatives had never understood the nature of my web site. They were blind to the interests of the thousands of you in our online community who had helped expand and improve it. They seemed completely oblivious of the fact that without you, there might not have been a book worth publishing. [...] Settling the Case [...] 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 web site 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 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 [45]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. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html