Terms of Use: A Real Difference Between Wolfram Alpha and Google

groklaw.net

44 pointsbayareaguy14 comments

In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it

If the answer didn't exist until I asked for it, am I not its creator, using WA as a tool?

Imagine a painter buying paint which says: "anything you paint with this paint is ours." Or a Rails eula saying "anythins you build with Rails is copyright DHH." Is there a difference?

(I understand that WA can slap on any TOS they want, I'm just wondering if this one is reasonable)

Or is it more akin to you commissioning them to create those results for you?

The paint in your analogy is the data behind Wolfram|Alpha. W|A are the ones that organized the data into a usable form, then created a tool, which is theirs, that we can use to access the data.

It is as if you were at a party and were shown to a room with an easle, brushes, and paint, none of it yours, and were told you should feel free to create anything you wish. Oh, and you may use the Star Trek matter generator in the corner to make an exact copy for yourself before you leave.

Attribution sounds reasonable to me. Especially since anyone who sees WolframAlpha as the source will understand that you were the one who querried the data out.

I used both Google and Wolfram on a High School math project (about Archimedean spirals and such) -- Wolfram Alpha gave succinct information. Google gave details. Both were useful.

I'm also using it for a statistics project. The comparisions you can do with Wolfram are awesome. Type in "New York City, San Francisco, Taipei" and it gives a triple-city comparison. Type Chicago Bears, and it gives stats I can use on my project.

Good stuff. It was slow as heck the first few days but now it's working well. Alpha def. has its strong points.

It's nice to hear that someone is actually using both tools to their strengths and to complement one another, instead of just dismissing one as being worse than the other.

TLDR version: if you want to commercially use any results found/computed with Wolfram Alpha, you must contact Wolfram to buy a license. If you want to publish those results non-commercially, you must include attribution to Wolfram Alpha.

Dunno about you guys, but for me this constitutes reason enough to never use the service.

For me it seems to be reasonable ...

In the same way you cannot use Google search results commercially, remix them, build on them.

Only Yahoo offers free API to its data through BOSS

If I get some knowledge through a Google search, I can publish it without attribution and use it commercially without pay. Not so with Alpha. Yes, I cannot offer users a service based on mass-remixing Google search results, but this is another matter and much more reasonable.

Nor can you with Google: someone wrote the page you found using Google, which in all likely-hood has it's own terms of service and associated copyrights. Copyrights you would infringe upon by republishing without payment or attribution.

Ah, but facts aren't protected by copyright. Wolfram Alpha deals a lot in hard facts, so presumably we're also talking about finding facts with Google.

>> "A great deal of scholarship and innovation is included in the results generated and displayed by Wolfram|Alpha, including the presentations, collections, and juxtapositions of data, and the choices involved in formulating and composing mathematical results; these are also protected by copyright."

Maybe I'm missing something, but how can formatting/data layout be protected by copyright? Is this why they use images instead of text?

> how can formatting/data layout be protected by copyright?

It's expression - that's what copyright covers. (Copyright doesn't cover facts or ideas.)

One of the problems I saw when I first used WA is that it doesn't tell you where the numbers come from. There are no bounds on error, no way to tell how recent they are, no way to see how they were derived. With Google, at least you can usually find a person to ask -- a webmaster, if nothing else. With Wikipedia, you can sometimes get a citation so that you can decide for yourself how reliable the source is -- or, failing that, at least you can see the edit history. But no such luck for WA.

Since the WA results appear to be clickable but don't go anywhere, I assumed that some feature would be later added to show you from whence the results were derived. But from reading this article, it sounds like they want you to believe that WA is the source of the knowledge itself. (Of course, playing loose with references and methodology for the greater glory of Wolfram is something of an inherited trait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodolo...)

My unenforceable contract can beat up your unenforceable contract.

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