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On closed category, somebody (posting as Archimedes, the only edit under that name) added a link to a scanned copy of the original article by Eilenberg & Kelly. This is a very useful resource (and would be even more useful if it weren’t missing most of the first 30 pages), and it is obvious to me that having that link (or some working link) on our pages is a public service to the readers of the nLab.
Putting a scanned copy online violates certain legal monopolies granted by the governments of most countries of the world (although not all), including the United States, all of the European Union, and most other countries where professional [edit] mathematicians are common. On the one hand, this means that telling people where to find a scan is even more important, if (as the anonymous contributor claims) this article is not available online in any way authorised by the legal monopoly-holder (which in this case seems to the infamous Springer-Verlag). But on the other hand, this means that telling people where to find that scan may be considered to be aiding a crime, and some jurisdictions assign legal liability accordingly (although in fewer countries, with Sweden the most famous exception).
Andrew, you’re the one who read and agreed to various terms and conditions to set up the hosting for the nLab. Do they say anything about this? (Note that anything against actually hosting copyrighted material is irrelevant to providing links.) Exactly which countries’ laws are involved? If we were subject to United States law, which is particularly insane, I would say that we’d probably better not host such links, but I’ll have to check on the others. (I’m not counting that Archimedes seems to be in the United States; that puts only him at risk.)
Also, sometimes people seem to find it a moral imperative to respect monopolies in the presentation of ideas. My opinion is the opposite: that as academics, we have a moral obligation to support the spread of knowledge as much as possible, including primary references. But this thread would be the place to voice any moral objections to hosting links to unauthorised online copies of copyrighted material, if anybody has any, in addition to the question of legal liability that I address above.
I will check the terms and conditions to see if they address this point.
The nLab server is in the US so I would guess that US law would apply. Again, I’ll check.
I agree with your opinion on the moral issue. But I don’t know the best way to address the issue and claim back our right to spread knowledge without borders. Is it a constant drip-drip-drip of making stuff available, or would it be best to work top-down: get the AMS to make a public declaration that it will defend anyone sued for making available a copy of something that appears in MR?
(While I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony, too)
We are more or less forced to give the copyright to our OWN articles to publishers due to the compliance of the public scientific system. In criteria for national grants of most countries, the papers published in commercial journals count, and especially if they are listed in commercial databases like Current Contents lists, though Thomson’s criteria put, according to an original article of Garfield, the scientific excellence of a journal as only number 7 among the criteria which include commercial and other criteria, even political one. Regarding that the public money favors commercial journals (thus excellent journals like Cahiers do not count but trash-erratic journals like Chaos, solitons and fractals once was do count) makes giving up the copyright for free to the journal an act of blackmail. Eilenberg and Kelly were effectively blackmailed to give this copyright up to the journal instead to the community they lived in and for. It is like signing up a contract under blackmail, but it is worse: the blackmail device is provided by the public money, included taxes of the blackmailed. If a significant (say 5%) part of the money used to pay for the commercial journals were diverted into improving alternative arxives to include more of the overlay services like online refereeing and if the grant providers did make the mechanisms to include the estimates of the value of the works not contained in commercial journals but in other forms of communication and refereeing, we would be free.
There is a further idea that may be worth working with. Some publishers agree that items over a given age should be freely available. In other words the publisher has covered their expenses and made their profit, so can now use/generate a bit of good will (perhaps). It does cost to scan a lengthy document but if the publisher could be ’persuaded’ to do this so as to make the original material easily and readily available, then that would be ’very generous of them’. (The cost could be offset against tax in many cases.)
’La Jolla’ is quite old and a public request from AMS, EMS and other similar organisations for that stuff to be made freely available could be useful.
I find the Current Contents scandal much worse than the non-availability of older material. I believe though that some progress is being made on TAC and Cahiers.
Yes, sometimes some publishers appear reasonable about noncommercial republication of old material. JSTOR is nonprofit organization which got to scan old issues of many, mainly angloamerican journals, with permission, but they started when the technology was not yet well chosen, In early days of JSTOR their default was GIF which is proprietory format of old generation, suboptimal in comparison to djvu for example. JSTOR charges big money to the subscribers. Now it would be unreasonable allowing JSTOR to charge for old issues of journals for which other nonprofit organization could not be able to do the same scanning thing. Also for some of the Grothendieck et al works, I think Springer allowed their works to be reprinted long time ago, provided they get all the signatures from authors, and they obtained, except for AG. (I am not talking about the newest developments in last 1-2 years).
Important thing is that mathematical societies should organize hi level journals with reasonable prices or which are free online. Annals of Math. is pretty cheap, while the best. Most Russian journals (Russian editions, not the monopolic western English translations) can be found at math-net.ru for free if older than 3 years. In science the copyright extinction by 75 years or more is ridiculous. In science, at least the things older than 10 years should be free of copyright. Some journals provide scans of old issues with terribly low quality. Expensive pre-1993 scans of Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra are ridiculously low quality scans, sometimes with unreadable subscripts. Anybody who buys such a thing has expectations corresponding to 21st century scanning; the outcome is so disappointing that I consider it an apparent fraud.
Finally, there is a question of “added value”. Lots of people agree that the limitations with formatting and size which come with published edition are subtracting quantity in comparison to our original arXiv editions of papers. Some journals, like J. Math. Physics scrape off the titles of references in order to have uniform short format. This is very bad for the reader, one can not know what one spends time in library searching for if not seeing the title of the references, which is often useful (especially for those having no full access to MathSciNet. Lots of editing done by editorial secretaries brings the errors. A colleague of mine told me how JMathPhys has changed the spelling of the names he quoted correctly (it is in one case about Russian person who did choose their English spelling uniquely in their English references and he used those). Then he needed to write an erratum about it and then he asked the journal to allow a sentence in the erratum asserting that this is due journal editing, hence a journal’s mistake. The journal scraped off the sentence from the erratum, what is outrageous disrespect toward the authors who they live on.
The nLab server is in the US so I would guess that US law would apply.
Yes, it would, regardless of the terms and conditions. (The T&C probably include a clause requiring us to obey relevant law as well.)
I think that this means that we should not include such links. Personally, I will make removing such links a low priority, and I doubt that anybody is going to sue the nLab (or send a DMCA letter to our service provider) if any remain. But I will not add them, and I think that our policy should be that they are not allowed (because not safe).
The Forum is in Norway, which may well have better laws. (Does NTNU say anything about this?) I have seen links like this posted in the Forum temporarily, although the ones that I saw were later removed by their author, perhaps for this reason of avoiding liability for the Forum.
their default was GIF which is proprietory format of old generation
This is not really relevant to your story, but GIF has been free of patents since 2006, although it is still technically inferior to PNG (and both are inferior to DjVu for long articles).
I think Springer allowed their works to be reprinted long time ago, provided they get all the signatures from authors
I haven’t heard about this! Does this mean that the article by Eilenberg & Kelly could be reprinted freely if Eilenberg and Kelly had signed so? Can their estates sign for them now? (Note that their estates would have no copyright ownership; that was all signed away to Springer, at least if the proceedings were published in the normal way. So it is Springer who would decide that their opinions are relevant, and exactly whose opinion that is now.)
Perhaps a group of senior category theorists could suggest that Springer consider freeing the articles in the La Jolla volume.
Hear hear, Tim
Archimedes has changed his name to Plato! Look at closed category and check the link for Eilenberg Kelly.
(also check the IP address. It has been used by someone before.)
Is it me? I have that book checked out from the library, and I slept for 36 of the past 48 hours, so it might be one of those spiderman venom-symbiote things, where in my slumber, I was compelled (impelled!) to violate copyright (of course, my secret desire).
No you are in the wrong part of the US!
I do not like the commercial publishers, and wish they would cooperate in getting a fairer system at least on older material, but I value the service that the n-Lab does more and so think we have to go along with the non-availability. (I think that summaries of material, etc. are usually more important than the prime sources, but that very occasionally there will be some point that is made in a paper which somehow gets ignored by the summarisers.)
Harry : Sleep well, sweet dreams.
There are sites on the web where virtually every math book is available for download.
I trust that eventually rumour spreads that it is enough to have the title of a book to be able to get hold of an electronic copy with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. And let those sites fight the legal issues.
Eventually every business on this planet that lives from selling nothing but bytes needs to and will learn the lesson that the music industry finally did learn.
I haven’t heard about this! Does this mean that the article by Eilenberg & Kelly could be reprinted freely if Eilenberg and Kelly had signed so? Can their estates sign for them now?
Somebody talked about Grothendieck works with Springer representatives who said that 1. the books are out of print; 2. Springer has no interest to republish them. Hence Springer alowed to go for a third party noncommercial repulication by mathematical community, regarding the copyright issues with the authors get resolved. I do not know if the same arguments and the same paths could be followed with Eilenberg and Kelly.
There are sites on the web where virtually every math book is available for download.
Many yes, but far from all (try to find e.g. Takhtajan’s Quantum mechanics for mathematicians, Aspinwall et al AMS book Dirichlet branes and mirror symmetry etc.). The law can punish not only providers, but to smaller extent also the people downloading such material. Most often however mathematicians download the books which they are used to use in everyday practice, hence they or their departments did already purchase a hardcopy and then they just want when they travel or they are not at home to use the same. I have originals of several hundred math books at home. But I can not travel with them, and even carry them between home and office. Another issue is that many publishers in fact denied many of the issues behind the original versions of translated books. For example, Russian publishers used to ignore western copyrights in Soviet Times, but also nowdays many western publishers republish in English soviet era books, neglecting the rights of public system which subsidized and actually financed creations of original. There are also issues with music. When organizing a public party organizers in my country had to pay tributes to the authors of music, some sort of tax, because it is understood that at public (commercial) parties music is performed. On many occasions we actually perform only fold music, and the societies of authors get paid for us playing that !!! Similarly, I pay now tax in Croatia for every memory medium, for example every recordable CD or DVD medium, regardless for what we use them (most people use it for . This tax is meant to offset the copyright infringements. France has banned such taxes, as they are not just: people use the media mainly for their personal files, their photos, videos, backups of their computer files and so on. The tax is typically one to several percent of the media file. If you take that say that 70% of the purchased media actually get filled and that about 0.5% of the content is copyrighted content and that about 80% of that copyrighted content is from the parties which are associated with western official author’s organizations (many publishers dissappeared, many are in third world or are not members of author societies) that amounts multiplied to about quarter of percent. Now if one pays couple of percent of tax, that means one pays 8 times more for copyrights than for media, per unit media used against copyrights. This is pretty serious money.
Eventually every business on this planet that lives from selling nothing but bytes needs to and will learn the lesson that the music industry finally did learn.
Urs, they did learn living on the taxes like the tax on recordable media. We should follow the example of France, where it is declared illegal to post tax on false premises (that the recordable media are used to infringe the copyright).
Archimedes has changed his name to Plato!
I’ve put a comment there leading our ancient Greek friend to this discussion.
also check the IP address. It has been used by someone before.
I’d also put a comment on his user page, except that he didn’t respond to my last comment there!
@Tim:
I think that summaries of material, etc. are usually more important than the prime sources, but that very occasionally there will be some point that is made in a paper which somehow gets ignored by the summarisers.
Yeah, but this paper of Eilenberg-Kelly has a bunch of giant diagrams (really massive, I must say!) that I’m pretty sure nobody wants to replicate.
If you want to xypic them for us with a summary of what they’re about, then I guess that would be good enough, but for some reason, I don’t think you’d be a happy camper copying all of those diagrams.
I sort of remember them! The book was always on loan to another of us PGs when I was one so I did not get that look a look at it then when I had time.
Giant diagrams are rarely readable (to me that is). I also suspect rarely really necessary.
Hey socrates, thanks for the scan. You should upload it to something like gigapedia!
Far be it from me to encourage activity that my government might consider illegal, but speaking hypothetically, a copy of this important primary source on Gigapedia would be a valuable public service to law-abiding mathematicians in Iran and some other places.
+1 @Toby
A video on Bruce Willis against Apple Co. on life-expiration of iTunes rights.
The story is fake: Charles Arthur: No, Bruce Willis isn’t suing Apple over iTunes rights.
But there we also have a wise comment:
Frankly Charles, I don’t care who brings this to the forefront of our collective consciousness, but this is really bloody important. Serious questions need to be asked about the longevity of digitally purchased items.
Whilst I personally do not care about itunes and I’m perfectly content with my personal music collection - i bought most of my 1300+ albums on CD and have them backed up to the hilt. My primary concern is my Steam account - I have close to 400 games that probably cost at least 4-5 grand overall. In the meantime my partner has a burgeoning ebook collection via Kindle.
However, snarking over the veracity of some tabloid hackjob seems a bit pointless when this is a serious issue that could really use some serious consumer champion behind it.
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