

Terms of Use: A Real Difference Between Wolfram Alpha and Google - bayareaguy
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090518204959409

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jeroen
_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)

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cubicle67
Or is it more akin to you commissioning them to create those results for you?

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kajecounterhack
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.

~~~
kenver
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.

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cousin_it
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.

~~~
csbartus
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

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cousin_it
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.

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DougBTX
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.

~~~
swolchok
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.

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axod
>> "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?

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

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

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jcl
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodology))

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eli
My unenforceable contract can beat up your unenforceable contract.

