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

That's pretty standard

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Wolfram|Alpha just killed their business

[ScentCone]

Hope they are not expecting to make any money by selling out their Customers at the drop of a hat.

How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.

Does it cut both ways?

[Bill Dimm]

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?

Re:Hah!

[Xest]

Well it claims to make information computable. I accept it's not meant to find results like Google but the issue with it is it doesn't even seem to gather basic data in a computable form.

I mean, you try things like "On what date did the Falklands war commence?", "How many species of Melocactus are there?", "On what date was Adolf Hitler born" and it outright fails.

Okay, so I figured maybe I'm asking questions that are out of the intended realm of knowledge it supports and the assumption is that you'd never want to compute with this information. So I tried something Mathematical - I mean, that is Wolfram's speciality right?

"How many non-isomorphic labelled trees are there with 4 vertices"

Fail.

I've tried a few other relevant, factual questions and it just falls flat over, not even able to try and answer them.

I'm sure it does do a great job of making information computable, the problem is it's unable to gather the information in the first place.

Ironically, Google, that doesn't claim to make information computable manage to provide answers for all these questions within it's first page, often as the first hit. Sure it may not be presented in a standardised format, but data that needs to be parsed is certainly more computable than data that simply can't be provided at all.

I can see what Wolfram was trying to do, but why did he have to couple it with immense hype that it's as important as Google? Why has he been going on and on about it to the media when it struggles to even do what it's supposed to absolutely excel at? I think they could've at least saved face if they'd stopped being so cocky about it and released it with a little less hype and fanfair and let it improve and become more useful and hence more greatly adopted over time. One has to ask when there was so much hype about it and with a ToS like this whether it was all just about Wolfram gathering data for himself or something than providing a tool useful to everyone else. Either that or he simply beleives his own hype and believes the tool is better than it really is. Perhaps in developing and using it himself he was blinded in making and seeing it work well for applications specific to what he wanted without ever truly seeing how well it performs in other problem domains?

Re:Nothing new for Wolfram

[The_Wilschon]

Well, it's hardly surprising, as Stephen Wolfram is a well known egomaniac who refuses to admit that anyone other than himself can possibly achieve anything. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/