> 1. UCB lawyers have other things to worry about than whether
> it is OK for some faculty member to (possibly) violate the
> copyright of some publisher.
Yes, I can see that the default response to such a query would be "no".
However, it is sometimes possible to find helpful counsel....
> 2. CRC Press is not a university press or a professional
> society press. It is run for profit. I am reasonably
> certain that if someone approached them to say "we want
> to use your property" that they would not say "go ahead
> and use it free".
That would not be the form of the inquiry. It would be more like: "We
plan to do thus-and-such, and believe that such usage of your material
is not infringement under the following precedents: .... However, we
would rather use it with your explicit permission. This has several
advantages for both you and for us. First of all, the material would be
explicitly listed as being your intellectual property, so this would not
be an opening for commercial competitors. Secondly, you would get
credit and publicity for the material. Third, since there would be no
litigation, there would be no chance that a court ruling would declare
your material as not copyrighted or not copyrightable." One problem
with this strategy, though, is that the CRC Press material would have to
be released under the GPL, which they may not want.
> 3. Regarding Weisstein's legal problems: it seems to me
> fairly clear that he sold CRC Press something that he
> didn't intend to sell them.
Agreed, the Weisstein case has very little to do with our situation.
> I think that the right thing to do is type into a computer
> the integration problems (NOT the solutions) in some suitable
> form, e.g. Mathematica, Macsyma, Maple, Mupad syntax. Then
> make a table of those inputs and the corresponding outputs
> (with simplifications applied).
If the list of integrals is covered by copyright, then whether you copy
just the problems or both the problems and the solutions should be
legally irrelevant. Remember, copyright does NOT protect the ideas,
only their expression. I would argue (but I am not a lawyer) that
copyright protects neither the problems nor the solutions. What it does
*arguably* protect (though I think it does not) is the *collection* of
problems and solutions under the compilation doctrine. This is the same
doctrine that allows me to copyright my collection of "Best British
Short Stories of the 19th Century" even if all the stories in the
collection are in the public domain. (A weird doctrine, but....)
My impression, by the way, is that NONE of the integrals in the CRC
handbook are original to CRC -- they are all copied from somewhere else.
So what is CRC's claim to copyright? Only the intellectual effort
involved in collecting, selecting, validating, and arranging them.
Remember, mathematical formulae in themselves are not copyrightable (or
patentable).
> The amount of work is really not that much, assuming that many
> of the answers come out in a form that is good enough for
> further use.
Yes, this I agree with.