Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"
blog.agiletortoise.com
Full URL: http://blog.agiletortoise.com/post/3564424414/wolfram-alpha-doesnt-get-it
blog.agiletortoise.com
"The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time."
Think for a minute what that forbids. Generating links programmatically, yes. Tweeting links? Yes. Emailing a URL? yes. Bookmarks? Oh, yeah...
Enforceability of the ToS aside, I think the original author is correct: that phrase in the Terms of Use shows that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't "get" the way the web works. Or at least they give too much free reign to lawyers who don't get it.
Exactly. For instance, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=does+wolfram+alpha+get+...
That's a good one, W|A :)
It seems that that only applies to general circumstance usage. That is, it appears, once can enter into arrangements with W|A to allow non-human usage of website.
To prove, just search for "calories in apples", for example in Bing or Google search.
Creating deep links to their content would be launching Mobile Safari with their content in it.
Now, it could be that after he talks to them and they have a look at his app, they decide that yes, he's framing their content but he does so in a manner they feel is in their best interests and is compatible with their business model as they see it. In which case, they will give him written permission to do so.
On the other hand, what if I write an iOS app just for getting answers from Wolfram|Alpha that displays the content using Webkit? I could certainly understand Wolfram arguing this kind of thing requires permission.
I'm curious about DuckDuckGo's use of Wolfram|Alpha content. There's an example of framing content and deep linking together. I assume they have permission or an army of lawyers?
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2 points by agiletortoise 1 hour ago | link [dead]
I expect they are. In retrospect, I should have asked first.
It something like going to a dinner party and having the host throw you out for placing your fork to the left of the plate, because they put them on the right at their house. Runs contrary to expectations.
--agiletortoise
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This doesn't look offensive to me, so I presume it's a glitch. It would be ironic if it was killed because of the signature at the end in violation of local norms. :)
Does this happen when a user deletes their own comment? Or is it only for flagged comments?
I trust HN's moderators, but it makes me uneasy to realize that there is a whole collection of censored comments that I didn't see until now, because I had showdead disabled.
I'm not sure if it requires karma.
http://www.something.com/ANYTHINGATALL
http://www.something.com/
I am currently developing a content aggregator site, but haven't decided how to link/display original articles. Should I be putting a frame at the top (or display orignal content in an iframe?) so that users don't leave my site, or should I directly link to the original article? I have strong suspicion that doing the former would be unfair, but some sites like stumbleupon do it to improve user experience.
http://www.reddit.com/tb/fp3vz
That said, feel free to do it, nobody can (or should) stop you.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_asp...
However, I'm also in a better position than judiciaries and legislatures, since I'm talking about right and wrong, not legal and illegal.
You seem to be confusing copyright law with contract law. ToS are generally considered part of contract law, under which anything that is not illegal can be part of the contract, and the parties agreeing to the contract would be obligated to comply.
There are exceptions to enforceability (like contracts of adhesion and unconscionable terms, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_form_contract) that may limit enforceability of a contract or terms of use, but "basis in law" is not necessarily required.
In contrast, copyrights (and patents, and trademarks) involve certain rights granted by law and explicit and unstated limitations to those rights. Owners of copyrights/patents/trademarks may make assertions that go beyond their rights and are thus not enforceable as they have no basis in law.
In the Wolfram|Alpha case, then, the questions involve (a) does linking to a site constitute acceptance of the terms of use? (b) does using the site constitute acceptance of the ToU? (c) are the terms actually an enforceable contract (not illusory/unconscionable).
If you want to say creating a deep link is a copyright violation, then any browser which allows bookmarking is in violation?
The reason I doubt it is that it opens a huge can of worms about how I could entrap a third-party into a contract that they haven't accepted and haven't exchanged consideration for.
" If your non-compete is valid, then a third party who induces you to break it can face the same liability as you, and possiby more. To avoid this liability, the new employer will often terminate the new employee, which it is free to do."
a) This still doesn't really answer my question.
b) Would it be illegal to put up a website and say that essentially no one can use it? Aside from some exceptions like discrimination, ToS's define how you can use a tool, which is exactly what they were doing. Is there some law stating that if you host a website, you must allow users to link to it in any way they like?
TOS enforcement stems from contract law. A principle of contract law says that a contract is binding on both parties if they agreed to it, but there must be SOME benefit to each party. A TOS between a website and its users clearly meets this threshold, but in this case agiletortoise didn't gain any benefit from the website -- he simply wrote a program that directed the user's browser to go there.
That being said, the best solution is the one that agiletortoise used: simply direct people to someplace less hostile, like Google, Bing, or Wikipedia, instead of Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha loses, everyone else wins.
I don't get that. Doesn't agiletortoise get benefit when their users get benefit?
As I said in my post, I'm fine with it. I think Wolfram's Terms are OK. I think it's a bit tenuous only in that if they were really serious about it, they could enforce that requirement in their code. They are not doing that, because it's to their benefit to allow some linking -- they are just reserving the right to selective enforce those terms, which seems a bit sleazy to me.
- agiletortoise
In other words, I think that if Wolfram chose to sue you for thousands of dollars plus court costs because you violated your contract with them that you would be able to say, in defense, "I never agreed to anything." Since Wolfram delivered the goods (some answers, in this case) to the USERS of your application, not to you, I think this might be a valid defense.
Of course, the strictures of polite behavior extend further than the iron force of the law. Polite behavior suggests that when they ask you not to link to them you shouldn't... which is exactly what you did.
> Is there some law stating that if you host a website
You're looking at this backwards.
The TOS is not a contract that automatically applies to everyone; I don't have to agree to it if I link to your site.
Generally, if you want to prevent people from using your website in a certain way (that's not blatant abuse/hacking/etc), you're going to have to resort to technical solutions, because your only legal recourse is copyright law, which may or may not apply.
None that I know of specifically - however putting a website up is an implicit contract allowing normal web usage (for credits: now define normal and enforce that contract).
There's no law granting exclusive rights in URLs unless they're copyrightable.
In the case of a website a copyright to that site is automatically created when the work itself is created - this is true in the vast majority of countries at least. Being able to view the site by making a temporary copy in your computer's cache is not clearly non-infringing. Someone aiding the creation of an infringing work can be acting tortuously in "contributory infringement" and hence linking to a website could, strictly, be tortuous. Applying common sense by assuming an implicit contract avoids the need to concern oneself with such apparent infringing actions.
Hmm, I hadn't thought about it from that point of view, but I think you're right. It seems like clear evidence that your copyright law (I assume you're in the US) has gone mad and needs to be put to sleep.
UK actually at present - US has some things better than us and some worse. It all could do with a good going over though!
Also, if they didn't render a result as an image, maybe it wouldn't take so freaking long...
Edit: No to Now
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+%2B+5
Granted, not all of their queries could be done this way, and some of those could indeed be done with canvas, for example. Dunno if those would be faster. But all of the numbers and tables could stand to just be numbers and tables.
This is more of a gripe about copy/paste than performance, really: I'd imagine their calculations take a lot longer than making a .png
What if they output in LaTeX for more complex things, and there was a LaTeX plugin for browsers?
I don't think this is a viable solution for W|A, however.
Anyone aware of a good solution for this? Shortener API's + An open source script?
The server should simply refuse to reply if the user has not agreed to the terms of use.
Apple will do what Wolfram says, but that's because Apple is acting in its best financial interests (30% of $1.99 for WA's app), not because Apple is legally bound to not distribute an app that links to Wolfram Apple.
If you go straight to a query, it bypasses this.
The O.P.'s app bypasses their ad, and Wolfram doesn't like that.
http://blog.agiletortoise.com/post/3587122629/wolfram-listen...
The bottom line is that Agile Tortoise didn't study the licence hard enough, if he had he would've seen that Wolfram Alpha wasn't the right fit for his tool. If he'd have looked further he'd have probably seen that http://duckduckgo.com/ has an API that he may well have been able to use to get the same results.
Instead he may now have to modify his software and probably resubmit it to Apple for review.
Measure twice, cut once. This applies as much to software licensing as carpentry.
(1) semantics (fun for the whole family!) what does deep linking mean in this context? We all say deep linking is bad, but to some the pre-populated query isn't deep linking, but to others it is.
(2) one of the (entirely sensible) things the Wolfram Alpha guys seem to be saying is "please don't hook bots up to us". Now no doubt some will bluster and say that if it is there in public they have a right to consume all the bandwidth and resources - after all if they didn't want people to do that they should just [insert complex but fragile technological solution that would quickly fail or be worked around]. As it happens, what this guy was doing falls into that category of automated client.
So on the basis of either one of those (if you squint real hard) I can see Wolfram Alpha's point of view.
A web request is merely a communication with the web server. The server is free to do what it wills with such a request. If Wolfram doesn't want to respond to requests from the author's apps, that's well within their rights. Similarly if they do respond, it's because they explicitly set it up to so respond.
Community and social standards often trump legalese. For instance, most absurd restrictions in apartment rental agreements are not enforceable.
In this case, linking to another site, no matter how "deep" the link is, is common practice.
If WA really doesn't like it, they can prevent it by checking the referrer, or going even further by adding a pseudorandom token to their query page, switched every 5 minutes and valid for an hour or a day, and redirecting deep links which don't have a valid token.
Of course, doing that would probably kill some traffic they like, so they have a silly, selectively-enforced and probably unenforceable ToS clause instead.
I don't see any reason why such provisions need to be enforced legally, since they can be enforced technologically in most cases. Expanding the law because of laziness is a horrible precedent.
Frankly, I would much rather read about a 2-bit adder implemented using 36 555 timers.
He's "in his situation" (edit) with Wolfram because he didn't do his due-diligence and contact them first before linking to them in his app.
EDIT: He seems to understand this, and admits that he "goofed", yes.
While this is technically true, I feel that it has slipped to the level of a polite fiction rather than a core civic principle. People pretty much never read contracts anymore because they've gotten so long and dense, and the contract writers know this and make them longer and denser anyway. Apple, among others, presumes you won't actually read their agreement before clicking through---they don't bother to sync up the printable version, don't provide a diff, and their system times out before you could possibly have read even a small part of the document. (I've written about this before, at some length: http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html .)
Sheesh.
And with that, I'm done with this thread.
So, yeah, he goofed a bit, but they could have been more flexible.
"You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."
I'm saying that he did something wrong and he's paying for it. Do you disagree? Do you think they should just let this slide? He didn't follow their TOS, so they should just say "whatever" and let it go? Wolfram has a responsibility to uphold their TOS so that it doesn't get abused.
My point is that I see a lot of posts around here where people go on rants about how they got screwed by a TOS, but the BOTTOM LINE is that they weren't thorough. They didn't do their due-dilligence. They didn't read the TOS, they didn't contact the company who's systems they are using, or some other small detail was missed. Rarely do we see a legitimate reason why someone is RIGHT after they got hit by a company for not complying with a TOS.
Look at companies trying to sell "market" apps in the Android Market, or everyone who is complaining about having to give Apple a cut of their SaaS revenues. The TERMS in the TOS agreements didn't change in most of these cases, but people are complaining when all of a sudden they have to pay the price for not reading, missing, misinterpreting, or ignoring the rules.
But hey, I get get downvoted for having a legitimate opinion, and you can get up votes for calling me an asshole.
It used to be fun here. I used to be able to have an opinion and people would praise the fact that I can look at something from another angle, be the devils advocate. But now, if I don't have a hive mind I'm an asshole.
I think you might be attempting to say something quite relevant without intentionally calling the person an asshole, but if that's the case, you ought to have explained it in your post.