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

Re:Compiled binaries?

[sys.stdout.write]

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

I hope Wolfram dies.

[tjstork]

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.

Claims or Tested in Court

[hackus]

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

Wolfram alpha sucks anyway

[recoiledsnake]

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