The Laboratorium (3d ser.)

A blog by James Grimmelmann

Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire afin
d'être violent et original dans vos oeuvres.

More Scared of the Copyright Law

In 1995 an engineer named William Dilworth, who had published a refutation of Cantor’s argument in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, sued for libel a mathematician named Underwood Dudley who had called him a crank. The case was dismissed. For myself I am more scared of the copyright law than the law of libel. After taking legal advice I decided not to quote any of the authors directly. The alternative was to write some letters saying in effect: ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t publish your paper as a contribution to logic. Can I please publish parts of it as examples of garbage?’

–Wilfrid Hodges, An Editor Recalls Some Hopeless Papers, 4 Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 1, 1 (1998)

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