Ask HN: Infringement notice from Wolfram Alpha | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Infringement notice from Wolfram Alpha

11 pointsing33k9 comments

Hello All,

I have received a Infringement notice from WolframAlpha for linking to their website from an android app.

Description of App : App shows the district in which a vehicle was registered using some characters in the number/license plate. When the user click the District name, the app redirects the user to WolframAlpha website (Eg: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Hyderabad ). I have unpublished the App for now. but the main doubt I had is isn't it just like linking to a website ?

TOS of WolframAlpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/termsofuse/general/

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> ... but the main doubt I had is isn't it just like linking to a website ?

Not if your app uses the site's functionality to produce a result.

If you link to a site like this: http://somesite.com , that's all right. But if you include an argument with the URL to get a specific result, that can be infringing.

If I post this URL with an argument:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve%28a+x%5E2+%2B+b+x...

I can get away with it (primarily because it's a free advertisement for Wolfram Alpha). But if I put the URL and its result into an app that I post on Google Play, and especially if I charge for my app, clearly that's an infringement of Wolfram's product and rights.

Now think. Wolfram Alpha is accessing an external database to acquire the data you need. What you should do is find out where Wolfram Alpha is getting their data, and go there instead.

IANAL or anything but the TOS states:

"Methods of Access 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. Because Wolfram|Alpha is doing computation, not just lookup, each query may require significant CPU time on multiple parallel servers. Any attempt to use a robot, script, or organized group of humans to repeatedly access Wolfram|Alpha could place an unacceptable load on the system, and is strictly forbidden."

So isn't it clear that they only want you to access their content by manually typing in a query ? Your app sends a query request to their server which is probably a violation because it could be counted as a "script", may be ?

The API TOS has other provisions, though, so I'm not sure if this applies.

http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/

"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."

Might not like it, but its not exactly ambiguous.

Some talk later on about commercial license. Might be worth a try.

I think all of these answers are good, but this one is the best. And I'd second contacting them. You might not come to an agreement but they seem reasonable.

why does wolfram then provide a way to do so from a machine?

How would they make it possible for a human to submit a query without making it possible for a machine to submit a query?

captcha

a) That would suck b) Why a priori prefer a technical solution to a legal one?

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