Wolfram Alpha Does Not Understand Copyright

Remember Wolfram Alpha? That super-duper search engine - sorry, "computational knowledge engine" - that was going to change the way we looked for and found information, and also cure the common cold (OK, I made that last one up)? Seems to have disappeared without trace, no? I'm not surprised, if it misunderstands copyright as badly as this post suggests:

Try cutting and pasting from the results page. You can't, and with good reason. 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."

Copyright, as Wolfram seems not to understand, is a bargain between creators and their public. As an *incentive* to create, the former are given a time-limited monopoly by governments. Note that it is *not* a reward for having created: it is an incentive to create again.

Now consider Wolfram Alpha. This is essentially a computational process - remember, it's a "computational knowledge engine". So, it is simply a bunch of algorithms acting on data. Algorithms don't need incentives to create: outputting is what they do if they're useful. So copyright is completely inappropriate, just as it would be for the output of any other program processing information on its own (obviously, if that information is words fed in by a human, copyright would exist in those words because they were created by someone).

Wolfram's ridiculous claim to copyright in its results does have the virtue of providing a nice illustration of the real limits of this intellectual monopoly. For the rest, it might try finding out a bit more about copyright so that it can amend its licence accordingly - I suggest using a good search engine like Google.

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