Seriously thoughtful count wolfram-alpha make copywrite laws worce

[ahammer]

they sure seem to be trying

According to Wolfram Alpha's terms of use, its knowledge engine is "an authoritative source of information," because "in many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it." Therefore, "failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram Alpha is not only a violation of [its license terms], but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law."

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer...e-software-248


if this happens to be held up what long term effects do you think it will have?

[griffonwing]

I think the professional, legal term for this would be "ca-ca"

[Elfwreck]

The article says,

Try cutting and pasting from the results page. You can't

I could. I wonder if it's only Internet Explorer that can't cut & paste; Firefox had no trouble grabbing text.

And one commenter noted:

In the case of this website, I would argue that the person who submits the query is actually the owner of the result. Unless the website creates result sets on its' own and we simply read those results, I don't see how Wolfram can have any claim to the result set - without the unique input of the submitor their would have been no output.

There's something to be said for that--machines can't create copyrighted content; people create content with the assistance of machines. And there's at least an obvious claim for the combination of Wolfram Alpha and the input user creating the copyrighted result; both parts were necessary, and therefore both entities should share copyrights.

[Sweetpea]

Is this for real or just a joke to show the craziness of the copyright laws?

[ahammer]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Is this for real or just a joke to show the craziness of the copyright laws?

sadly real.