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."

Comments

slow searches

[NynexNinja]

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!

who fucking cares

[circletimessquare]

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