Math­World—a divi­sion of Wol­fram Research, the cre­ators of Math­e­mat­ica—was tem­porar­ily shut­down in late 2000 due to a copy­right dis­pute over a book based on the website.

Eric Weisstein’s com­men­tary on the shut­down reveals a lot not just about being on the receiv­ing side of an unfounded law­suit, but also about pub­lish­ing and its appar­ent change from a book-lovers’ busi­ness, to one run by peo­ple “unashamed to treat infor­ma­tion as a commodity”.

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.