How Wolfram Alpha's Copyright Claims Could Change Software

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that Wolfram Research's claim to copyright of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine could have significant ramifications for the software industry. 'While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of the output of the software itself,' McAllister writes, pointing out that it is 'at least theoretically possible to copyright works generated by machines.' And, under current copyright law, if any Wolfram claim to authorship of the output of its engine is upheld, by extension the same rules will apply to other information services in similar cases as well. In other words, 'If unique presentations based on software-based manipulation of mundane data are copyrightable, who retains what rights to the resulting works?'"

Comments

This is not so surprising for Wolfram

[gilleain]

Given that he (allegedly) tried to sue because of a citation, this should not come as a surprise. Especially since that case was about an employee researcher whose proof (that rule 110 is capable of universal computation):

From this review of 'A New Kind of Science'

So this essentially means that no-one will want to do anything generally useful with alpha, if they won't benefit from their work?

Copyright is for Creative Works

[kawabago]

Facts, figures and data returned by a search engine are not eligible for copyright protection, you can see that from a plain reading of the law. Corporations would love to extend copyright onto everything so they can make more money, but that is not the purpose of copyright and this idea will be tossed out on summary judgment.

Re:Compiled binaries?

[DragonWriter]

The source code (or original work that Wolfram Alpha reads) can be copyrighted. Anything resulting from machine manipulation of that is a derivative work and there's already copyright rules for dealing with such.

A "derivative work" under US copyright law is an original work, and copyright in the derivative work belongs to the work's author, just as for any other original work. The significance of the status of "derivative work" vs. any other original work is that it is a violation of the copyright of the work from which the derivative work is derived to create such a work without the permission of the copyright owner of that prior work. See the definition of "derivative work" at 17 USC Sec. 101, the description of the exclusive rights in copyrighted works at 17 USC Sec. 106, and the description of copyright ownership at 17 USC Sec. 201.

"Originality, not hard work"

[dpbsmith]

"Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, 102(b). [499 U.S. 340, 341]... A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship....

Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test - which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves - misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas."--Feist vs. Rural Telephone, U. S. Supreme Court, 1991.

Obviously it's not cut-and-dried, because Wolfram Alpha does more in the way of selecting and compiling facts than the average computer program, but it is still a mechanical process.

The person who designed the wind chime that hangs outside my house put some creative originality into it, but I would hate to think that the output of the wind chime itself is copyrightable, just because the wind chime's mechanism rearranges the notes into patterns that no human thought of before.

If the court decides that the output of a machine meets the test of originality, and if there's any validity to the theory that an identity of seven consecutive notes constitute plagiarism of music, then I am certainly going to set my computer to work producing as many different seven-note sequences as it can as fast as it can, and try to copyright them all.

FSF disagrees

[jbn-o]

I'd trust the FSF's take on this more than Wolfram's because the FSF has a long history of interpreting copyright law correctly. The relevant GNU GPL FAQ entry says:

Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?

In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.

So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.

You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text.

Wolfram has no interest in user's freedoms (as should be obvious from their claims to control user's output) but the implications of this are interesting for Wolfram considering what compiler Wolfram is likely using to make GNU/Linux and MacOS X binaries. I think Wolfram is merely looking at this situation with the most restrictive interpretation not just for the user (which is enough reason to reject Wolfram's programs entirely) but with regard to which copyright holder would control what.