The alarming story of MathWorld: originally the pet-project of a math-obsessed high-school student, the site grew to be one of the definitive resources for math online. By the time the author was in college, he had a book deal to publish a math encyclopedia based on the site. Almost immediately, it became apparent that his publisher thought that now that the material was available in book form, it should come down off the Web. The author got a job with a research institute and moved the site from his school’s server to his employer, and before he knew it, his publisher had sued him for copyright violation. Now, after a long hiatus, the site is back online.

Another important consequence 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. 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 online to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, JIMwich!