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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?'"
No kidding.
And what about all those phat beats I made in FruityLoops[1]? Are those copyrighted by FL Studios?
[1] I have never made phat beats
Many years ago when procuring a data processing system for air traffic control, one bidder had buried in their small print that they retained copyright on all data produced by their system. We didn't buy that system (the copyright claim was an influence) so I don't know how it would have played out in court.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Seriously, I mean, people that do what he does just wreck the world for everyone else through unmitigated greed. Claiming the output of a program? For what? So he can try and figure out ways to charge people for 2+2=4? Just, what a jackass.... I seriously, everytime I read about Wolfram, the guy is more and more of a dick all the time. I'll piss on his grave, for sure, when he finally kicks off.
This is my sig.
In all those cases, you would be the author (assuming we are talking about your work in Garage Band, and ignoring the monitor display since it is uncopyrightable). Therefore you would claim the copyright.
However, in Wolfrum Alpha's case, you contribute no original content (a search string). Nor can the data that Wolfram gives back to you (facts) be considered original content eligible for copyright protection. However, their method of organizing the data IS protectable by copyright, if it's creative.
Look at this search. None of the data would be protected, and I doubt that the organization top-to-bottom would be. But the organization plus the color would be. You couldn't reproduce a close replica of the presentation.
Not legal advice. Although if yoy want my legal advice, it can be yours for a modest* fee.
*Fee includes cost of sending me to law school.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Well,
I can tell you one thing. If it ever is held up in court and program output becomes copyrighted in any way, I am basically going to quit the industry and open up an Italian restaurant.
I have no intention of participating in a field that is seething with greed and sowing the seeds of its own darkness.
The restrictions of IP are so catastrophic right now, that real advances in computer usability are essentially being delayed and in their place, anything that you can create with pretty bitmap graphics is declared a HUGE ADAVANCE or some how "cool".
This whole mess is because we do not make anything worth a damn any more. In my opinion everyone wants to live like a king and do little if any real work, which is what the whole idea of extending copyrights and IP to ludicrous ends is all about.
Computers suck right now, and I do not see it getting any better if this sort of restriction is placed on the industry. Can't f'in own anything any more because some rich arse has a army of lawyers to bribe congressional leaders and grease the rails for new extensions to IP laws.
Perhaps we should target Wolfram in earnest, and simple remove the incentive to buy Wolfram products. We did it with UNIX, (we=open source community). Mathematica could be rebuilt in 5 years with a good focus.
Some projects such as Sage already have made large strides:
http://www.sagemath.org/tour-quickstart.html
Sage has similar capabilities to Mathematica including the separation of client and server for example.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I might be able to be _convinced_ to go along with copyright on the results of their search engine IF .....
They were willing to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the accuracy of their results. If I relied on the results of their search engine to design a pressure vessel and it blew up, they should pay damages.
If they have the right to copyright for what their software generates, they also have the responsibility for the accuracy of what their software generates.
Somehow, I don't think they'd stand behind their results .....
The key word is "claims". Until this is tested in court, anyone can say anything.
I've heard that EA initially tried to claim that it held the copyright to all works created with Deluxe Paint (which originally came out in the mid-1980s).
Don't know when or why they stopped claiming that (legal or PR reasons?)
This is obviously a far from identical case, but it has some of that flavour.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This not a troll. I am serious. For a full analysis read here --> http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html
Some choice quotes
Indeed (as we'll see), every decade since the '80s, billions of dollars and gazillions of man-hours have been invested in this fundamental error, to end routinely in disaster. It's as though the automotive industry had a large ongoing research program searching for the perpetual-motion engine.
The error is that control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.
I was reminded of this lesson by a brief perusal of Wolfram Alpha, the hype machine's latest gift. Briefly: there is actually a useful tool inside Wolfram Alpha, which hopefully will be exposed someday. Unfortunately, this would require Stephen Wolfram to amputate what he thinks is the beautiful part of the system, and leave what he thinks is the boring part.
WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance, which needs to be taken out back and shot. It won't be.
et's examine this difference between Google and WA. Basically, Google is the exception: the UI that is not a control interface. Because Google's search interface is not a control interface, it should be an intelligent interface, as of course it is.
Google is not a control interface because intrinsic to the state of performing a full-text search is the assumption that the results are to some extent random. Let's say I've heard of some blog called "Unqualified Reservations" and I type it into Google.
Am I sure that the first result will be the blog itself? I suppose I'm about 95% sure. Do I have any idea what will come next? Of course not. Will I automatically click on the first result? Certainly not. I will look first. Because for all I know, the million lines of code that parsed my query could be having a bad hair day, and send me to Jim Henley instead.
Google is not a control interface, because no predictable mapping exists between control input and system behavior, and none can be expected. A screwdriver is a control interface because if I am screwing in a screw and I turn the handle clockwise, I expect the screw to want to go in. If the screw is reverse threaded, it will want to come out instead, confusing me dreadfully. Fortunately, this mapping is not random; it is predictable. (Yes, Aspies, by "random" I mean "arbitrary.")
But if you are an actual flow user who actually needs to get something done, WA could give you an alternative, manual interface for selecting your tool. You might perform the discovery task by browsing, say, a good old-fashioned menu. For example, the Nutrition Facts tool might come with its own URL, which you could bookmark and navigate to directly. There might even be a special form for entering your recipe. Yes, I know none of this is very high-tech. (Obviously the coolest thing would be a true command line - but the command line is truly not for all.)
A more intriguing question is whether the Graffiti approach can be applied to full-text search. Many modern search engines, notably the hideous, awfully-named Bing, are actually multiple applications under the hood - just like WA. If Bing figures out that you are searching for a product, it will show you
This space for rent.
> 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.
When I lived in Sydney in the 1980s and worked for a government department related to mapping, one now defunct producer of a pascal compiler attempted exactly that. They tried to introduce a phrase into their licensing agreement that not only claimed they had a license to use the resulting binaries, but that their unique version of pascal* meant they had a license over any source used as well, because it was written for their compiler and theirs alone.
After some arguing to and fro, we dumped them, and they were out of business by the end of the decade.
* Anyone working on pascal after 1983 should know exactly which compiler I'm talking about.
This may pass the test. From what I can tell, Wolfram Alpha is not a generic search engine that indexes content available on the web - it is, instead, an interface to a database of facts that were input by the Wolfram people. Since they most likely hold copyright to the input data, then the "mechanically generated translation" (ie: the results pages) of it retains the copyright of the original data.
General search engines that base their database off the results of spiders indexing the web cannot have their results pages independently copyright because it is a "mechanical translation" and therefore carries the copyright(s) of the original works. This holds true for the output of compilers and similar tools.
NOTE: IANAL and the above is based on numerous discussions I have had with lawyers and my own reading of the US Copyright statutes. So YMMV. Also note that the above only applies in the US - other countries copyright legislation may allow for the results of a "mechanical translation" to carry their own, independent copyrights.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
no-one will want to do anything generally useful with alpha
It does raise the temptation though to go tossing random queries at the engine in the hopes that they try to register all of the results with the copyright office. I doubt the copyright people would be amused even if they tried to register all of the legitimate queries.
How is this different from a paint and brush manufacturer claiming that all works made with their products also belong to them??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Actually, this has been tested in court. The output of compilers and word processors in particular has legal precedence in terms of copyright that the creator of the software has a copyright claim to the output.
Some compiler publishers, notably Borland from back in the 1980's and 1990's, used to explicitly grant an unlimited license explicitly for computer software developed using their development tools. Microsoft has a similar kind of license, but it is much more complex and filled with legalese and all kinds of exceptions that ought to concern a for-profit company using MS tools for software development.... if they really understood that all software developed using Microsoft software (technically even the operating system under some precedents that go back to the 1960's ad 1970's) can have Microsoft asserting copyright over anything produced.
Lack of enforcement of such "copyright" doesn't mean that it can't be enforced at some future date.
Macromedia... the creators of both "Authorware" and "Flash" files... does assert a copyright claim to content produced with their tools, and you have to go out of your way to explicitly buy a license for republishing software produced with those tools on a commercial basis. I'm not as familiar with their policies after their merger with Adobe, which is another story altogether, as I have generally avoided Macromedia tools due to this practice.
To the best of my knowledge, I believe that the Free Software Foundation doesn't expect nor have they written their licenses like the GPL to be viral in nature to force the output of GPL'd software to also be GPL'd, but then again on that point I don't think there is any legal precedence to the contrary on open source software. I have read explicit opinions made in a casual manner, including at "geek" conventions of various types, where Richard Stallman doesn't want the GPL to cover copyright that broadly. I'll leave that for armchair lawyers to fight over.
But the issue here is that such precedence has occurred, and even beyond compilers. The issue with word processors is mainly in terms of the output and mark-up codes... the output to the printer explicitly covered under copyright. With such legal precedence to back you up, I sure wouldn't hold my breath for a judge to simply dismiss the case. The legal precedence goes back to the 1960's at the very least.
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.
Bad? Depends on who you consider...
Think about this from a Free Software purist point of view. First of all, this would mean that anything produced by a GPL'd compiler would automatically fall under the GPL - and gcc is probably the most popular compiler in the world today for any language. It would effectively take the existing FSF stance on using GPL over LGPL for libraries for ideological reasons (so that people have an incentive to switch to GPL, as they get the benefit of accessing all the GPL'd libs that they otherwise cannot use), and take it to the whole new level.
On the other hand, it would suddenly move the presently-extreme approach of "pure Free OS" - such as gNewSense - from strictly ideological stance to a practical, pragmatic position. Any non-Free software that you use "taint" its output, and, therefore, can potentially taint your system and data, legally restricting you - its owner - from doing some things with it. Forget about "viral" GPL, that would truly be viral! And the only way to say safe is - right, to use Free software exclusively.
So, in effect, this would separate the software world into Free and non-Free parts more than anything else possibly could. Which may well be the desired effect for those on the Free side of it.
It's not a translation, because the output has nothing to do with the source code; you cannot inspect the binary and translate it to the same source code.
Clearly the output must have something to do with the source code! Since when does a translation have to be a one-to-one, reversible mapping? A clear example is Babelfish. That is an obvious mechanical translation and yet it drops the gender from adjectives when translating from French to English so that both "Je suis grand" and "Je suis grande" map to "I am tall". When you ask it to translate back it chooses "Je suis grand".
This is the same as a compiler. Like English in the above example, machine code carries around less information and so some data is dropped when converting from, say C++. The machine code generated will depend on the compiler, just like a language translation will depend on the translator program you use (although for very simple examples there are not many options for difference). Seems exactly like a mechanical translation to me....
You missed the really fun part about all of this: GPL is based on copyright.
Everything anyone edited in the GIMP is now GPL'd.
Everything anyone made in Blender is now GPL'd.
Used Audacity? It's GPL'd.
Here's the real kicker: how many non-GPL programs out there do you think are compiled by GCC? Well, now, they're GPL'd too. Any game released on linux, for sure (World of Goo, UT200x, Quake 3 [oh wait]), and tons of other programs where people use GCC because they don't want to deal with/pay for anything else.
As much of a free software advocate I am, this would screw over everything. I hope some stupid judge doesn't uphold this without realizing the implications.