Wolfram|Alpha's Surprising Terms of Service 303
eldavojohn notes that Groklaw is highlighting the unexpected Wolfram|Alpha ToS — unexpected, that is, for those of us accustomed to Google's "just don't use it to break the law, please" terms. Nothing wrong with Wolfram setting any terms they like, of course. Just be aware. "We've seen people comparing Wolfram's Alpha to Google's Search from a technical standpoint but Groklaw outlined the legal differences in a post yesterday. Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine; it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution. So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move. There's more: if you build a service that uses their service or deep-links to it, you may be facilitating your users to break their terms of use, and you may be held liable."
That's pretty standard (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't claiming ownership of the bits of data they provide, they're claiming copyright over the whole page. Sort of like how an encyclopedia will copyright the book even if it includes quotes from people. Basically over the presentation of the data.
Additionally much of what they would be claiming copyright over isn't subject to copyright protections. Things such as birth dates and astronomical data aren't subjected to copyright protection.
First it would have to actually do something... (Score:5, Insightful)
the legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution.
and that day appears a long way off, especially given the way they hyped it.
Besides, all their data comes from somewhere, and I don't see those attributions. And by all their data I mean symbolic integration, fractals, and Wolfram's formulation of a Turing machine which no one else uses.
I don't know what Alpha will be like in the future, but I was extremely disappointed in the present, and imagine Google^2 will make Alpha obsolete very soon anyway.
Re:Database Rights? (Score:4, Insightful)
If so, I think they're not enforceable outside the EU.
Duh. That's a brilliant observation.
I'll never forget the CIO who told me (I was a consultant presenting a Help Desk application that we had been hired to implement and were about to deploy at his company) - "It doesn't look enough like Google. I want it to look like google - just one line that I type what I want into."
Now, to me, google (or google's address bar) is a huge improvement on the Command Line. I bet the same guy wouldn't have wanted to return to the days when you had to guess what the command-line needed you to type, much like an Infocom adventure game.
That's why Google is a huge improvement - it tries to figure out what YOU want. That's the reverse of a command-line, where you have to figure out what IT wants.
Re:slow searches (Score:2, Insightful)
It isn't a search engine; it doesn't search. I'm going to rip my face off if I hear another person refer to it as a search engine.
Re:That's pretty standard (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not for lack of trying [techlawjournal.com], though.
Re:Wolfram|Alpha just killed their business (Score:5, Insightful)
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
Does it cut both ways? (Score:5, Insightful)
If attribution is required because (according to the TOS):
In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.
Does that mean that Wolfram|Alpha can be sued for slander if its algorithm generates a false statement about some individual or corporation by "misunderstanding" the data it is digesting? In other words, if the result is something uniquely generated by Wolfram|Alpha, deserving of attribution in the same way that an author of a book deserves attribution, do they also deserve to be held liable if the content they are generating is incorrect or slanderous?
Re:Nothing to worry about for academics (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but such a citation is also very useless for the readers of an article, since a search engine/computational service does not produce immutable results. You never know when you read the article and check the stuff in Wolfram Alpha yourself, if the results you get are the same the authors used.
Basically a service like Wolfram Alpha is not usable as an academic source.
Re:Nothing to worry about for academics (Score:5, Insightful)
You think it's not reasonable? Then write your own Wolphram Alpha, if you really think it is that simple, and use that instead of WA for your work. Man, you have no idea what you are talking about here. Modern biology would be nowhere if people who build such "turing machines" were not credited for their work, and consequently get grants for their research.
For example, tons of software in bioinformatics is written with a completely open source and well known algorithms, using data gathered by experimentalists, and yet they get the recognition -- because someone had to come up the with the idea, gather (and maintain!) the data, run tests, implement, etc. etc. Believe me, even with simple ideas and algorithms and for simpler data sets this is a shitload of work. Heck, even re-implementations of existing tools get recognized.
Secondly, a scientific procedure requires that you publish your methods -- you have used software X to generate figure Y and table Z, then you have to write how you did it. And noone in her or his right mind will reimplement existing tools just for the sake of the current work without a very good reason.
That said, sometimes a tool like that allows you to "get on the trail" -- which you then pursue using something else. For example, WA would give you a hint that there might be a connection between cancer and, say, cigarettes, and you show this connection using clinical trials. In such a case, however, when you do not publish the data from WA directly, nor any figures derived from it, you are not required to cite it.
Note that I am in no way convinced that WA is of any use. The parts of it that overlap with my area of expertise (biology / biocomputing) are naive and rudimentary, and mostly useless to say the least.
j.
Re:Wolfram|Alpha just killed their business (Score:5, Insightful)
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
They can both be considered customers. I'm Google's customer because I give them money; not directly, but through their advertising. Of course, that depends on the definition that you use for customer, but I'm giving Google something they want (pageviews and advertisement clicks) in exchange for them giving me something that I want (good search results). If we're not their customer, then we're very close. If I go to another site for my searches, then Google loses money.
Re:Hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it claims to make information computable. I accept it's not meant to find results like Google but the issue with it is it doesn't even seem to gather basic data in a computable form.
I mean, you try things like "On what date did the Falklands war commence?", "How many species of Melocactus are there?", "On what date was Adolf Hitler born" and it outright fails.
Okay, so I figured maybe I'm asking questions that are out of the intended realm of knowledge it supports and the assumption is that you'd never want to compute with this information. So I tried something Mathematical - I mean, that is Wolfram's speciality right?
"How many non-isomorphic labelled trees are there with 4 vertices"
Fail.
I've tried a few other relevant, factual questions and it just falls flat over, not even able to try and answer them.
I'm sure it does do a great job of making information computable, the problem is it's unable to gather the information in the first place.
Ironically, Google, that doesn't claim to make information computable manage to provide answers for all these questions within it's first page, often as the first hit. Sure it may not be presented in a standardised format, but data that needs to be parsed is certainly more computable than data that simply can't be provided at all.
I can see what Wolfram was trying to do, but why did he have to couple it with immense hype that it's as important as Google? Why has he been going on and on about it to the media when it struggles to even do what it's supposed to absolutely excel at? I think they could've at least saved face if they'd stopped being so cocky about it and released it with a little less hype and fanfair and let it improve and become more useful and hence more greatly adopted over time. One has to ask when there was so much hype about it and with a ToS like this whether it was all just about Wolfram gathering data for himself or something than providing a tool useful to everyone else. Either that or he simply beleives his own hype and believes the tool is better than it really is. Perhaps in developing and using it himself he was blinded in making and seeing it work well for applications specific to what he wanted without ever truly seeing how well it performs in other problem domains?
Not a search engine... or yes? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it does NOT search. But they sold it this way - or at least they played aggressively with the idea.
While creating PR buzz around it, they introduced it like "not a Google killer", when nobody had any idea what the thing was (so they could introduce the concept just the way they wanted to, and they explicitely chose to introduce the Google benchmark, even if to negate it.) And they obviously KNEW where this approach would have led to, in people's mind.
In other words. If I launch a new ecommerce platform and I create a buzz around "not an alternative to eBay", I am then driving on purpose people towards a comparison with eBay.
On top, on interviews I read, they toyed with "talks" they were supposedly having with "major search engines" (one was in the NYT).
So they get what they were fishing for...
Re:Nothing new for Wolfram (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Man, you try too hard. I tried the simple "what time is it" and I got:
"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.Tips for good results Â"
Tips for good results: cut down the hype.
Re:And yet (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't identify the sources of particular facts used (for instance, if you ask for the population of a country, you'll get a Wolfram|Alpha "Primary Source" -- and a whole list of other sources that are generically root sources of population data.)
Meanwhile, if I ask Google for the population of a country, I get a numeric answer with a specific website that is the source of the information. (I point to that specific example because its one thing that has been repeatedly held up, I assume by people who have never actually used Google, as something that W|A is good at that Google can't do.)
When you ask W|A a fact question (as opposed to an abstract mathematical/logic question), you get some response, with no idea of how the response was derived or what actual source data was, in fact, used to derive it. That might be occasionally entertaining, but its pretty much useless for any serious purpose.
Re:Hah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, after seeing this is I can understand their terms of service. You can't have a linear thought process to understand why they have the terms they do.
They're trying to corner the market on the semantic web. It's not the results that are technically all that interesting, it's how you can use those results that makes it worth money.
Google is for all intents and purposes a catalogue. It doesn't return any data (and as time has gone on returns fewer relevant search results).
W/A is returning data about data. This is where the internet gets interesting and they are trying to say they own the results they give you, which is not true but they do own the right to keep you from using those results without paying them a royalty on their service if they choose. Lexis Nexis does the same thing, basically.
Re:Hah! (Score:3, Insightful)
For wolfram alpha to be successful they will need to develop their natural language parsing abilities, it's not easy to do, each question may require individual interpretation. At this point using google is better for understanding more abstract concepts.
I've used wolfram alpha to help with my linear algebra homework for the past few days. Good info for checking my work. Matrix example [wolframalpha.com]
The best part is using it on a phone, it's made my G1 a more powerful calculator than my good ol TI-92.
Re:This just seals the deal. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, this is the Integrator on steroids. It'll be great for anyone who doesn't have Mathematica or needs to use Mathematica on the go, like on a phone.
It certainly blows Google calculator away.
Re:Hah! (Score:3, Insightful)
do a search for any website (here is slashdot for the click impaired [wolframalpha.com])
Congratulations, but "deep linking", you've violated their terms of service.
Hmm, I guess I did too.
I wonder how they're gonna prosecute us, seeing as neither one of us was presented by so much as a "click-through" agreement.
Maybe someone needs to tell them that just saying something doesn't make it so.
Re:Database Rights? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Wolfram is a smart guy. The problem is that he probably has enough money now that he doesn't really have to listen to criticism. He works for his own company in which he is a majority shareholder so he can't get fired. His ideas (e.g. A new kind of science) are published by normal publishers, not peer reviewed journals. In every professional interaction in his life he's made sure he's in control, i.e. no one can tell him that he's talking out of his ass.
The problem is that humans - especially smart ones - have an enormous capacity for self delusion. Back when he was a physicist the people he worked with, the peer reviewers of the journals he submitted papers to and the people he wrote grant application to would act to keep him relatively grounded. Now even if he wrote wild speculation or even complete nonsense he's rich and famous enough to find someone to publish it, and they'll probably sell enough copies to do it again. Even if they didn't he's probably set for life with the money he got from Mathematica.
So he's free, but that sort of freedom is a very dangerous thing if you actually want to achieve anything intellectually.
Re:Nothing new for Wolfram (Score:4, Insightful)
You make a good point. If you are doing ground-breaking research that depends on computer calculations, how can you be sure that the results given to you by mathematica are accurate and not a bug? Reworking the calcualtions by hand defeats the purpose of using the software in the first place, if that is even possible (some physics simulations take weeks of _computer_time_ to compute).
At least with open source computer algebra, one can verify the method used to compute the results.