More Scared of the Copyright Law
The Laboratorium 2019-08-20
Summary:
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)