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Wolfram|Alpha's Surprising Terms of Service
eldavojohn notes that Groklaw is highlighting the unexpected Wolfram|Alpha ToS — unexpected, that is, for those of us accustomed to Google's "just don't use it to break the law, please" terms. Nothing wrong with Wolfram setting any terms they like, of course. Just be aware. "We've seen people comparing Wolfram's Alpha to Google's Search from a technical standpoint but Groklaw outlined the legal differences in a post yesterday. Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine; it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution. So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move. There's more: if you build a service that uses their service or deep-links to it, you may be facilitating your users to break their terms of use, and you may be held liable."
Hope they are not expecting to make any money by selling out their Customers at the drop of a hat.
This is a British company (god save the Queen!) - aren't they talking about database rights? If so, I think they're not enforceable outside the EU.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The easy solution: Just use Google.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
Gave wolfram alpha a spin today and found it extremely uninspiring. Given these ToS I doubt I will ever go back.
They aren't claiming ownership of the bits of data they provide, they're claiming copyright over the whole page. Sort of like how an encyclopedia will copyright the book even if it includes quotes from people. Basically over the presentation of the data.
Additionally much of what they would be claiming copyright over isn't subject to copyright protections. Things such as birth dates and astronomical data aren't subjected to copyright protection.
the legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution.
and that day appears a long way off, especially given the way they hyped it.
Besides, all their data comes from somewhere, and I don't see those attributions. And by all their data I mean symbolic integration, fractals, and Wolfram's formulation of a Turing machine which no one else uses.
I don't know what Alpha will be like in the future, but I was extremely disappointed in the present, and imagine Google^2 will make Alpha obsolete very soon anyway.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
They don't attribute their sources, such as Wikipedia. They may be on a slippery slope here....
its nice if you like waiting several minutes to return any search results.... i ran a couple searches and i got so bored of waiting that i started doing something else and then completely forgot about it, came back about 3 minutes later and it was still searching!
We're all going to get sucked into a the black hole that will be formed when Stephen Wolfram's ego collapses under it's own weight anyway...
All they ask is that you attribute them when publishing results derived from their service. Example:
Methods: "The comparative population studies were derived from the Wolphram Alpha service (Wolphram, 2009)"
Regular thing for academics. I cite NCBI blast service, I cite PFAM, I cite dozens of other services out there. Most of these tools require or ask for an attribution; and in most cases, this is anyways necessary in a scientific procedure.
j.
Wolfram Alpha doesn't just provide you with knowledge. It provides you with a new kind of knowledge. Any knowledge you gain from it must be attributed to Stephen Wolfram ... because he invented it. It is actually safer to attribute all citations to Stephen Wolfram, in fact, because he is smarter than you.
Breakfast served all day!
Of course I can see them wanting to be attributed for calculations? But what's the problem with that? I *want* to see attribution when a blog, newspaper, or scientific report spits out a series of numbers anyway, especially if it involves something else than raw mathematics, like statistics. That's something I see as important as they can just as well demand it in my opinion. I consider it a service to me.
If there's something that annoy me, it's unsourced calculations. If it's attributed to WA, then I can at least use the same query on WA and in turn see what WA used as sources for that specific query (under the "source information" link at the bottom of each page)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
So they are saying basically that since it is a "computational service" that they have the rights to the question that I used in order for them to do that particular computation? How does that work exactly?
Isn't that a little like saying that since you are a chef and I give you the ingredients for chicken pot-pie and tell you to make it since I don't know how, and you do so, you have the rights to the pie you made?
As far as attribution, I don't have a problem saying that they helped me, once they can also state their attributions.
For every present, there is a past
I asked: "My mother and your mother were hanging out clothes. My mother punched your mother right in the nose. What color blood came out?"
WolframAlpha answered: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."
I guess folks say that to me a lot, though, whenever I ask them something.
Google with the same question gave me a link to "Ghastly Games," which I though was pretty amusing.
So it depends on what type of service you are looking for on the Internet . . . answers to serious questions, or just plain amusement.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Is there actually anywhere (US or EU) a legal basis for them to bar people from linking to their site?
(+1, Disagree)
Of course it requires attribution; it's used to create original data. You shouldn't use BLASTN or CLUSTALW without citing their authors, why would it be any different for something like this? As has been mentioned numerous times already, W|A is not merely a search engine. It's a set of algorithms for manipulating the data that you specify.
And how pathetic/dishonest a scientist or professional would you have to be not to want to attribute it? Sources of information should be cited and experimental results should be verifiable.
(c) Wolfram Alpha. From now on, I'm going to make sure that I attribute all failures to understand to Mr. Wolfram.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The law already protects databases of public facts. Why would a spontaneously generated list not be copyrightable? Personally, I hope that the courts will see through that argument and call it a violation of the spirit of the law, but I won't hold my breath that they won't say that a list of copyrighted quotes isn't protected if the creator of the list claims that THAT list is protected.
Wolfram got bit, BAD by its case with mathworld and the corresponding book.
End of story, the tail wag the dog and CRC turned (almost stole) an 'pre-wikipedia' and turned into its own property.
It's not surprising he's being extra careful now.
how long until
There are couple of really scary things in the terms of use. For instance, minors are not allowed to use the service without the permission of adults, and adults become fully responsible for the actions of the child. I am unsure of why they felt they had to put that in there. Then there is the first sentence "The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time". I hate to have to define what a conventional browser is. For may people it would be only IE.
More scare is the ambiguous policy to deep linking. To wit "It is not permitted to use Wolfram|Alpha indirectly through another website that has created a large number of deep links to Wolfram|Alpha, or that automatically constructs links based on input that you give on that site, rather than on Wolfram|Alpha. You may not in effect use Wolfram|Alpha through an alternate user interface presented by another website." Clearly they want to not have bots and third parties writing code to hijck the site. Disappointing given the wonderful work they did with Mathworld.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
http://www97.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6*9+in+base+13
you just got shown.
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
Anyone else find the fact that locational searches link to Google maps satellite images to be somewhat ironic?
They are sending results back as images, I would expect everything from them!
how is this original data? This is just a public fact.
If attribution is required because (according to the TOS):
In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.
Does that mean that Wolfram|Alpha can be sued for slander if its algorithm generates a false statement about some individual or corporation by "misunderstanding" the data it is digesting? In other words, if the result is something uniquely generated by Wolfram|Alpha, deserving of attribution in the same way that an author of a book deserves attribution, do they also deserve to be held liable if the content they are generating is incorrect or slanderous?
What sort of search engine is this!?
I typed in 'porn' and it gave me pie charts.
Is what the Internet has come to?
I searched for
eigenvectors {{1,2},{3,4}}
and it copyrighted the answer. Calculus students beware ...
I typed: airspeed velocity of a swallow
Input Interpretation: estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow
Result: there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow
(even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)
(asked of a general swallow (but not answered) in Monty Python's Holy Grail.)
Of course, now I know there are 47 species of swallow in Africa.
Put in 4/0 (four divided by zero) and you get a divide by zero error, which breaks the page and outputs a bunch of database junk. They didn't think of this?
Naturally, I asked WolframAlpha about it.
Wolfram didn't know what to do with that input.
I have no use for such a shoddy search engine.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Haha, they want donations of effort and data organization from "experts" in various fields. This would not make me want to contribute.
The machine is basically computing stuff, that's great, but it's dynamically generated content. Their copyrighting the presentation as well as some of the data (according to the TOS) but aren't specific about what is and what isn't.
Basically that boils down to just trying to copyright facts and always have the upper hand so they can slap anyone they don't like.
Their 15 minute video was intriguing, but in practice they have almost none of the medical crap you claimed actually in your dataset. Also, I found it very amusing to have tried some of the terms in their examples yesterday and get a "crappy service doesn't know what to do with your search terms" or whatever it says.
It looks like its results are case sensitive, but the redirects don't know that.
Did a search for 'hockey' and got some general information (as expected). Tried a new search for 'ice hockey' which attempted to redirected to 'Hockey' which apparently isn't a doesn't exist (the capital 'H' throws it off).
Then it asked for my e-mail address for some reason...
I innocently entered "Secant Tangent Cosine Sine 3.14159" into WolframAlpha. The result, 74.69263, now belongs to Wolfram. Sorry about that.
One digit short of a palindrome.
I note that Wolfram|Alpha happily deep-links to Google Maps.
I typed in my home town and it placed it somewhere in the North West Territories (Canada). So I used Coordinate Distance Calculator to calculate the distance to the actual coordinates, it seems that Wolfram|Alpha was only 6478.05 kilometers / 4025.27 miles out. Not bad...
Seems pretty desperate to insist on citation to me - I note it suggests being the 'primary reference' in articles and essays! Well, no - if my students cite W|A as their primary reference there's going to be some low marks flying around. Similar paranoia surrounds Mathematica - download their 'home' version and you're apparently forbidden to publish anything 'discovered' with it. This is apparently a privilege only afforded to purchasers of the 'full' version. Fine. I'll keep using my existing software - imagine being stymied by having your breakthrough at home only to be sued by Wolfram for having your idea on your own time instead of, oh... your own time. Wolfram needs to take himself and his products less seriously.
intellectual property is a house of cards built on higher and higher imaginary concepts and baseless arrogant demands on otherwise normal behavior, ignored outside of the western world, which supposedly champions freedom, but provides carte blanche to corporate entities to claim rights and priveledges over your cultural inheritance. i applaud the creativity of variosu lawyers as they extend the tentacles of what can be owned into higher and higher levels of cognitive output, but it means nothing more than shit, because its all founded on a flawed imoral premise that any of this output can be controlled and owned in the online world in the first place
fuck it all. fuck the entire house of cards that is intellectual property. i'm beyond ignoring it, i'm outright hostile to the notion of intellectual property nowadays. we need some sort of outright sabotage on these fuckers. by which i mean: not real world violence, but outright purposeful disobedience to any of these notions of "i control this" when applied to material which can disseminated and consumed in digital, online form
fuck this western corporate arrogance called intellectual property. its an immoral sham, and kind of a joke, that nayone expects you can control any of this
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
try clicking the links.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
All your base are belong to them!
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Anybody who has used Wolfram's products, such as Mathematica, for more than a few versions, knows that they don't have, how shall I say this? a very enlightened view of the relationship between the party that sells a product and the party that buys that product.
In fact, their user agreements have always been among the very worst in the software industry, that is, if you happen to believe that the consumer has any rights at all beyond the right to give money to the vendor.
They've always been pretty hostile toward their customers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, would that output be literary, musical, or artistic?
Meanwhile, the search term "a document granting exclusive right to publish and sell literary or musical or artistic work", produced 523 results on Google.
I wonder if WolframAlpha just forgot to name the source?
FAQs are evil.
try clicking the links.
You must be new here.
Where I'm going, the law doesn't really apply...
http://www44.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ecstasy+synthesis
They also own pi to 2000 digits.
This whole "new kind of [whatever]" meme might be really funny if it weren't so sad -- not because Wolfram doesn't really think he is smarter than almost everybody else (he does), but because - reportedly - he can't be prevailed upon to care about what most other people think, let alone how his choices might affect them:
I think Wolfram's attitude evokes pity, but indignation seems to be a far more common response. He should really consider working on (or, if he's already done so, promoting) A New Kind of Wolfram; he might find it a terrific challenge, but the new kind of Stephen would probably get more recognition than the old kind.
Beyond their examples and a few symbolic calculus examples I haven't actually got it to return anything other than "I'm not sure what to do with your input"
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Yes, it does NOT search. But they sold it this way - or at least they played aggressively with the idea.
While creating PR buzz around it, they introduced it like "not a Google killer", when nobody had any idea what the thing was (so they could introduce the concept just the way they wanted to, and they explicitely chose to introduce the Google benchmark, even if to negate it.) And they obviously KNEW where this approach would have led to, in people's mind.
In other words. If I launch a new ecommerce platform and I create a buzz around "not an alternative to eBay", I am then driving on purpose people towards a comparison with eBay.
On top, on interviews I read, they toyed with "talks" they were supposedly having with "major search engines" (one was in the NYT).
So they get what they were fishing for...
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
How is a document generated by a computer program in response to an external users query an original work of authorship created by Wolfram? Sure, the computer program itself is, but that's a different issue. If its not, it isn't subject to copyright by Wolfram, and nothing in W|A's terms of service can make it so.
Never mind the search results -- your "Angelina Jolie nude" search yielded something much more valuable. Behold the power of this incipient meme:
The possibilities are endless.
I think the internet needs more "vouched-for" information like Wolfram-Alpha that one can cite in a study or paper. Trying to find out basic facts is tough and very shady on the internet. I also LOVE the way the pages are formatted- crisp, clean, contrasted colors, and easy to read. I think the "citation" stuff will go along the lines on other parts of Wolfram's site like their mathematical explanations: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/ConstrainedOptimizationExact.html **HAS ANYONE ACTUALLY BEEN ABLE TO READ (AND UNDERSTAND) NKS AND CAN EXPLAIN WHAT THE HELL IT IS??
Wolfram Alpha sucks anyways. Try looking for big tits on that site. Goes nowhere but the definition.
http://www26.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cup+per+2+girls+in+liters+per+girl
thank you wolfram, i never got my around that imperial system
Can't even figure out what the "world's population per capita" is...
I decided to see what all the hype is about, so I tried a very simple trig identity "sin (x) cos (x)" to see what answer Wolfram would give, and I was surprised to see this output:
1/2 sin(2x)
Periodic in x with period 2pi <== This should be "Periodic in x with period pi" -- unless I'm terribly mistaken.
Curiously, when you enter: 1/2 sin(2x) directly, it yields the correct answer: Periodic in x with period pi.
I don't know how to account for this bug, but if it could be so wrong about something so basic, I wouldn't trust it for anything complex, and I hardly think that its results are worthy of citation.
The problem they face is an old one. It's not possible in the united states to copyright facts which is all they deliver. That's why in the United States anyone can publish a telephone directory as the numbers are facts. Most of the results returned by this search engine is facts with no enhancement. Plus in the fast majority of situations it's facts mined from other people's data, web pages, and web sites. As such no copyright for them applies on that material...
Reportedly, Feynman heaped praise on Wolfram, thus showing Feynman to be a fallible human.
I'm noticing that some queries pull data from your past queries. I previously queried for local weather. But now, when I query for "average world temperature" or somesuch, it's giving me results for local weather.
It may be tricky to cite the query with a link when it relies on user data. Anyone finding other examples of your query history being used?
A nice plot of the number of cases / deaths made by swine flu. http://www55.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+swine+flu Alpha could be useful for getting plots like these, that are hard to find in newspapers (where they usually only mention the current amount, not how it evolves)
You are making the easily understandable mistake of assuming that the "Source Information" link does, in fact, liest the sources of information used in the query. While you'd think that would be the case, if you actually read the disclaimer at the bottom of the popup list of sources, you would see that it specifically states that the information provided is "intended as a guide to sources of further information", and disclaims any necessary connection between the cited sources and any particular Wolfram|Alpha search result.
A Wolfram! And all alone on on this dark site? My dark site?!
Grabbing my statistical data for its "computational" engine?
*grins*
You see, I heard the birds twittering about you, Wolfram.
Wanna know what they told me?
*pulls professional killer gun, aka army of lawyers*
Weeell... They told me, that you claim copyright on my data.
Can you believe that?
*cocks hammer solely for dramatic reason, aka takes legal action*
You know I have terms on my data too, do you?
And they say, that in case someone steals my data and claims copyright on it, that that one might get hurt really bad.
You don't want to get hurt really bad, do you, Wolfram?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I don't know... But... How are they going to prove that I took the data from their site? If it is physically possible for me to create them from other sources, they can't, can they. So the point is moot. Except for scientific work, where you have to state your sources, and where you can not make up your own sources on-the-fly. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move." You can copyright something if it quotes someone else - people do it all the time (*especially* academics). The question is whether it is (a) a "work" in the copyright law sense and (b) fair use of the material. I would posit that the W|A engine is putting together a document in response to a query. Short quotes are probably fair use. I'm not sure who the "creator" or the work is though :-) Interesting ...
We used to chant that every Friday morning in calculus in high school. Man we were geeks!
Though I have no proof of this and Wolfram may prove me to be wrong, I get the feeling that most of the time ToS's are used to cover them in case they need it, rather than persecute people. I suspect if you use it to generate answers that you could otherwise get through Google, Wikipedia, or other means (books, magazines, audio, lectures), they would have a very hard time pursuing you. And if they did, it would kill their business.
I would think the purpose of this is to cover them in case somebody finds a novel way of turning their computational engine into a cash cow. Well, good for whoever does that, but then again, they ARE piggybacking off the hard work of someone else - Wolfram. Therefore, Wolfram *SHOULD* profit/benefit from aforementioned cash cow. I doubt anyone's going to give them money of their own free will. This ToS gives them the legal means to enforce it. Of course, what they *should* get and what they end up getting is debatable and would depend on the cash cow and how much it relied on Wolfram. But of course, Wolfram as a company would like to put themselves in a position of power if such a situation arises rather than rely on the good will of others.
I don't think they'd be stupid enough to pursue someone when their answer is another copyrighted source. Copyright is violated everyday all the time all across the web by blogs, Google, Wikipedia, etc, etc. In my view, it's really only a CYA move now and I think it's going to be a matter of time before it's completely ignored because too many cases of unpursued or accepted copyright violations will come up as precedent.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
This is exactly why so many left Geocities back in 1997/98 when Yahoo purchased them -- the new Yahoo ToS claimed that Yahoo owned all content on Geocities webpages. I don't think Wolfram is going to get away with this, but I'm sure a lot of lawyers are going to get rich.
....that I am not held to the TOS of anything I use. I just don't care, I don't read them, I don't follow them and so far it has worked out pretty well for me. I suspect most people are the same. I think that it's silly that so many products that are easily available and many of them are free have long and basically unreadable TOS. I know they are enforced only for the exceptional case and not in any sort of universal way. My belief goes like this; if I don't read your TOS they don't apply to me. I would like to try this in court, frankly I don't think any cares about what I am doing that much. Well, time will tell.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
I think the primary purpose of this TOS is simply to encourage people to link to Wolfram|Alpha. Note the part about how it would be best to link to the specific result -- keep in mind that from Google's perspective, such a link creates another "page" on the site which Google can index, thus giving Wolfram|Alpha more opportunities to rank well in Google.
I think this is an SEO tactic, and not much more. I use much the same terms on my site. It'll probably work, too. Look for Wolfram|Alpha results to start beating Wiki in the Google SERPs.
As such, I doubt they'll be particularly vigorous about enforcing it, as long as they get lots of links and violators keep a fairly low profile.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(sinc+(x)+*+sinc+(y))+
I'm sure you could do better if you had more time.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
So, okay. According to wolframalpha they're an authorative source. If I search for Norway language - or just Norway - they claim the following language distribution:
North Saami (48%) | Romani Tavringer (19%) | Finnish Kven (16%) | Norwegian sign language (13%) | Romani Vlax (1.6%) | Lule Saami (1.6%) | South Saami (0.96%)
So, this is according to wolframalpha, the authorative source. It is, of course, completely wrong.
The main language in Norway is, surprise surprise, Norwegian. North Saami is spoken by less than 2% of the population (probably less than 1%).
Seems they haven't forgotten to reply the question "what is the meaning of life?" in a geeky way
Those who hold the keys may use them either to lock or open doors, but never for both at the same time.
Personally, I think WALy (hey, I like that.. Wally) will use the keys to keep the doors open.
-J
I also tried various approaches to things it *should* be good at, but once again, not very impressive.
Same experience here. I tried "semiderivative of cos(x)" and even "semiderivative of c". It claimed not to understand, and it suggested things like "derivative of cos(x)" or "cos(x)" as related searches. These suggested searches, of course, resulted in nice summaries of the expected sort.
However, the "semiderivative of c" should be a doddle for Alpha, since the answer can be found in Wolfram's own web site at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Semiderivative.html
I'm only slightly impressed (for the moment, anyway).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Lets see how many ads they can sell then.
People doing searches are the most important costumers Google has, even if the don't play a single penny.
Clearly many people out there, in spite of being sitting in front of a bloody computer, perhaps for many years, can't grasp how some business models , based on the availability of cheap computers and fast network connections, work.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If it were Apple, PJ would be saying "It's their site, so they should be allowed to put whatever they want. If you don't like it, you can fight it in court or just not go there, but they're plainly saying what their terms are, so it's fine."
I gave up GL when PJ wouldn't see the hypocrisy in her works (sterling as they are) against bad actions by corporations that WEREN'T Apple and her stance at the same thing being done by Apple (like Apple suing Pystar for copyright breach and DMCA clauses where they don't apply).
I prefer tits in pairs:
http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(sinc+(x)+*+sinc+(abs(y-2)))
(move the image off the axises, then mirror the other side)
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I'm sorry, I don't trust any legalese (or software) from a Senior Partner of Wolfram & Hart!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life%2C+the+universe%2C+and+everything
Your claim that Google's ToS are limited to "dont use it to break the law" is absurd and factually incorrect. Google reserves the right to own much of the content that you produce through their services, such as gMail and your search terms. You can verify this yourself at http://www.google.com/privacy. The MS ToS are indeed odd and more restrictive. But to simply pretend that Google is a friendly giant, these days, is naive and absurd.
agree that in its present form, it's useless. try the subject query "where is the soul" in wolfram and google. google tries to answer the question. wolfram thinks it's in south korea.
-British
-egomaniac
-trying to corner the worlds markets with an evil plot
Yep. Steven Wolfram meets all the requirements of a Bond Movie villian.
Keep your eyes out for Jaws. He should be popping up chewing on Sergey Brin any second now.
apple/day
How many people would actually break out of their habit of hitting the Google bar to toss these nitwits a bone?
Have a nice day -> tits
Having put W|A through a somewhat arbitrary test, I'm inclined to say it lacks usefulness. Type in "How High the Moon", and it gives you facts for the movies "How High" and "Moon". Check the release date on that second one. How long ago? It doesn't give you any reference to the song, or any facts about astronomy.
Or try "What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"-- it makes you rephrase it, but eventually comes up with an answer. A smarter machine would have rephrased the question itself.
However, "What is the duration of an orgasm?", "Who won the English Football Cup in 1949?", and "What is the speed of greased lightning?" all return the same answer: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.-- which is probably copyrighted. I claim fair use.
Now these are only marginally more useful than the porn search mentioned above, but I invite you to try getting useful results of your own from W|A. Alpha, indeed! I figure in a year, we'll get a marginally useful Wolfram|Beta, and a year after that, Wolfram|1.0, followed a week later by Wolfram|1.0.1-- if it's still commercially viable by that time. I have my doubts.
...doesn't mean you win an infringement claim. I'm reminded of that website that claims your phone number may be copyrighted. I've forgotten the URL, but it claims to hold copyright to a variety of melodies, possibly including your own phone #! It invites you to enter your number to see if it's copyrighted. I entered 000-000-0000, and sure enough, the site claims it's copyrighted! Then it demands a license fee, which you can arrange through that very site. I know there must be someone out there dumb enough to have paid the fee.