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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?'"
The key word is "claims". Until this is tested in court, anyone can say anything. I could make a contract that said anything, I could say for each click you owe me $50, however to collect that I would have to sue and most likely the judge would throw it out. Until this is tested in court, it means nothing.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Modern compilers do a lot of optimization. By analogy to the Wolfram claim could compiler optimized binaries be considered subject to a copyright via the compiler? That would be bad.
The display on my monitor is now copyright Acer.
The output of Garage Band is now copyright Apple.
The document I just wrote in Word is now copyright Microsoft.
The text message I just sent is copyright Verizon.
The photo I just took is copyright Canon.
This opens Pandora's box like you wouldn't believe. We should be restraining copyright, not expanding it.
I void warranties.
This is absurd. They used programs to create their Alpha Engine. Does that mean that whoever wrote those programs owns their engine? It'll never fly.
There goes any remaining chance of anyone actually using this search engine...
Sounds a lot like the retail chains claiming copyright on information from their Black Friday fliers to keep the prices from being posted too early. Granted Wolfram Alpha is a little more complicated but if it is simply processing facts and laying them out in a certain way they might be able to patent the algorithm but the results are still facts.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Copyright requires that a human creates something. Wolfram's software is clearly not a human, and it is unlikely to be even close to artificial intelligence either. Hence, no copyright.
A phone book publisher doesn't own the right to your phone number, nor does it own the exclusive right to print listings of phone numbers, but it does hold copyright to the unique presentation of phone numbers. That is, you can copy the phone numbers out of their book, reformat them, print it, and sell it, but you can't just photocopy each page and the sell that.
Assume for a moment that Kurzweil is right, that people will be mergeable with machines, that your mind can be dowloaded into a neural simulator and run - recreating you, thoughts, memories, etc. All of you.
So there you are, a process running on a computer, probably in some 3D game on steroids - eternal life! But if this copyright grab stands, and the software running the simulator is copyrighted, does that mean that your very thoughts are copyrighted, too?
If you assume a materialist definition of the world, that what we see is what is, and there's no spirit, no Valhalla, no flying spaghetti monster, then we humans are, in fact, a functioning material machine.
Thought police, indeed.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Hang on... this is like the "trying to copyright pictures of paintings in the public domain." You can patent a camera, but it has been unambiguously ruled that trying to copyright a photograph of something in the public domain does not add any creative value to the painting and thus does not constitute a novel creative work. Same thing here, you can patent/copyright your bit of software, but claiming that any output it generates also constitutes a creative work by the coder of the software will not fly because the user of the software is usually the one who is doing the creative work. Maybe I'm thinking more along the lines of word processors and books where this is obvious and any goon trying to claim otherwise would be laughed out of court....
"Im sorry Dan Brown, but Bill Gates has the rights to your new book since you use MSWord2008, should have used emacs."
Also, fuck Wolfram, I was given a copy of his big fat book "New Science" or whatever, I'm not going to read it, and I can get Mathematica for free through my Uni, but I think I'll stick with my TI83 emulator since TI doesnt have a God complex.
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The copyright of machine generated work has been a matter of law for more than a hundred years.
If you think this is in any way open to debate, ask yourself who drew Toy Story.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I can state that the sky is green, but it don't make it so.
Yes, the NMap authors claim that a program which "Executes Nmap and parses the results" is a derivative work, but that doesn't make it so. They don't actually claim the output is copyrighted.