How Wolfram Alpha's Copyright Claims Could Change Software 258
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that Wolfram Research's claim to copyright of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine could have significant ramifications for the software industry. 'While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of the output of the software itself,' McAllister writes, pointing out that it is 'at least theoretically possible to copyright works generated by machines.' And, under current copyright law, if any Wolfram claim to authorship of the output of its engine is upheld, by extension the same rules will apply to other information services in similar cases as well. In other words, 'If unique presentations based on software-based manipulation of mundane data are copyrightable, who retains what rights to the resulting works?'"
This is not so surprising for Wolfram (Score:4, Informative)
Given that he (allegedly) tried to sue because of a citation, this should not come as a surprise. Especially since that case was about an employee researcher whose proof (that rule 110 is capable of universal computation):
From this review of 'A New Kind of Science' [umich.edu]
So this essentially means that no-one will want to do anything generally useful with alpha, if they won't benefit from their work?
Copyright is for Creative Works (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Compiled binaries? (Score:5, Informative)
A "derivative work" under US copyright law is an original work, and copyright in the derivative work belongs to the work's author, just as for any other original work. The significance of the status of "derivative work" vs. any other original work is that it is a violation of the copyright of the work from which the derivative work is derived to create such a work without the permission of the copyright owner of that prior work. See the definition of "derivative work" at 17 USC Sec. 101, the description of the exclusive rights in copyrighted works at 17 USC Sec. 106, and the description of copyright ownership at 17 USC Sec. 201.
Re:Compiled binaries? (Score:3, Informative)
There are indeed some compilers sold with licenses that claim certain rights over the binaries compiled. This, apparently, used to be common practice, and for quite some time in the 80s and 90s, it was actually a selling-point for compilers to specifically permit people rights to do what they wanted with the binaries resulting from a compiled program.
Re:Wolfram alpha sucks anyway (Score:1, Informative)
So fucking what, his post was an interesting read, while *YOUR* contribution to this discussion was to whine about something offtopic.
"Originality, not hard work" (Score:4, Informative)
"Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, 102(b). [499 U.S. 340, 341]... A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship....
Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test - which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves - misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas."--Feist vs. Rural Telephone [findlaw.com], U. S. Supreme Court, 1991.
Obviously it's not cut-and-dried, because Wolfram Alpha does more in the way of selecting and compiling facts than the average computer program, but it is still a mechanical process.
The person who designed the wind chime that hangs outside my house put some creative originality into it, but I would hate to think that the output of the wind chime itself is copyrightable, just because the wind chime's mechanism rearranges the notes into patterns that no human thought of before.
If the court decides that the output of a machine meets the test of originality, and if there's any validity to the theory that an identity of seven consecutive notes constitute plagiarism of music, then I am certainly going to set my computer to work producing as many different seven-note sequences as it can as fast as it can, and try to copyright them all.
FSF disagrees (Score:4, Informative)
I'd trust the FSF's take on this more than Wolfram's because the FSF has a long history of interpreting copyright law correctly. The relevant GNU GPL FAQ entry [gnu.org] says:
Wolfram has no interest in user's freedoms (as should be obvious from their claims to control user's output) but the implications of this are interesting for Wolfram considering what compiler Wolfram is likely using to make GNU/Linux and MacOS X binaries. I think Wolfram is merely looking at this situation with the most restrictive interpretation not just for the user (which is enough reason to reject Wolfram's programs entirely) but with regard to which copyright holder would control what.
Re:Compiled binaries? (Score:3, Informative)
The law certainly seems to give human creativity special status. There's a lot of fuzziness in the definitions of virtually all copyright and patent rules that needs to be filled in.
Without delving deeply into philosophical matters, my problem with their claim (or at least one of my problems with it, I probably have more but I'm not thinking too hard) is that it disregards the role played by the person who triggers the query in the production of the output. They've put together a complex system of rules for combining data based on the input from the end user. For any given input and database, the output is arrived at by following a rigid set of steps. Sure, you may get a computation that's novel, but it doesn't sit right to claim that because they assembled the framework for answering it, they claim the sole copyright on that output. If my experience in science and engineering has taught me anything it's that asking the right questions is often the more important part of the (technical) creative process.
Looking at it this way, we naturally assign copyright over software to the guy who wrote the source code. We don't assign the copyright of the binary to the compiler author or the compiler. I still don't see why this program is any different. If Wolfram controlled the whole process -- software and input -- then sure, but that's not the case here.
Re:Clip art (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't matter how much came with it - they tried to claim copyright over images created by anyone. In other words, if you went into DPaint and pixeled everything yourself, not even using clip art or fonts, they still claimed the work as theirs.