Slashdot | The Return of Eric Weisstein's World Of Mathematics

[Karsten M. Self]

on Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 05:29:03PM -0600, Jim Choate (ravage at 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 at ix.netcom.com>       http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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