Please see the response from Wolfram|Alpha at the bottom of this post.
One thing has become clear: to succeed on the Web and in the next generation of software, you need to invite, not dissuade, outside participation. Tim O'Reilly calls it an "architecture of participation," but whatever you call it, the best software strategies are those that encourage outside contributions, rather than discourage it.
This makes Wolfram Alpha's terms of service mind-boggingly backward at best, and troubling at worst. Some have pointed to the quasi-search engine's sometimes weird results as a reason to give the service a pass, but there's a far more fundamental reason to reject Wolfram Alpha , as Groklaw suggests.
Wolfram Alpha demands citation when using the results of its "searches," which is a distinct departure from Google's "use pretty much as you please" attitude, and will almost certainly curb the appeal of Wolfram Alpha, no matter how good its output becomes. Groklaw writes:
Wolfram's Terms of Use are not at all what I would expect from a search engine, probably because that isn't exactly what Wolfram Alpha is providing. It's a computational service, at least in some cases providing computational output from various sources of data that perhaps never existed until you asked your question. So, they claim copyright on the results and require attribution. That's fine with me, so long as the information provided really is uniquely theirs and not just the answer to what is meaning of life and everything, but it is different from what I'm used to from Google and other search engines, so it is counter-intuitive, something to be aware of before I include Wolfram Alpha output in a presentation on Groklaw or in a book.
In other words, Wolfram Alpha requires: "If you make results from Wolfram Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram Alpha." It's a fair request, but it may not be a reasonable request. Not if Wolfram Alpha wants people to actually make widespread use of the service.
Groklaw concludes that this requirement "means Wolfram Alpha will never replace Google," which is absolutely correct. Even if Wolfram Alpha delivers better "search" results, the burden of figuring out and delivering proper citation is going to keep people using Google, which doesn't make the same fetish of proclaiming its ownership of search results.
Wolfram Alpha may well prove to be the best computational search engine on the planet. But until it learns to lose the heavy hand of enforced citation, it's going to struggle to become a first-choice search tool.
UPDATE @ 12:48 PT. Wolfram|Alpha's Theodore Gray contacted me with the following commentary on my post above.
Hi, I'm the person who wrote most of the language in the Wolfram|Alpha terms of use, and I want to correct a couple of things you got from Groklaw.... There are two basic confusions they have perpetrated: First, Google does copyright its results pages just like we do in all comparable cases (e.g. images.google.com, news.google.com, etc).
And second, Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine: We don't return "search results", we generate original content including plots and graphs. A more comparable situation would be Google Maps, which Google claims copyright on just like any other map provider. Similar, look at pretty much any site that generated financial trend charts, weather charts, you name it, they are always copyrighted. We are not doing anything more aggressive or grabby than Google or other widely used websites: Groklaw simply got it wrong.
I would be happy to answer any further questions you might have, but please, if you're going to criticize my beautiful terms of use language, please at least read it carefully first, and understand that it's not talking about search results. I'm happy to entertain criticism, but not if the starting point is that we're more restrictive than Google, because that's simply not the case.
My response? This misses the point of my post. As I wrote back to Theodore:
Thanks, Theodore. I quoted your terms of use directly - not sure how I can do more than that? Reading Groklaw's take and your note below, I stand by what I said. I absolutely think you have the *right* to require attribution, and I understand the reasons for doing so....
My argument is that by insisting on this, or at least not making it brain-dead easy for your users, you're going to a) make it difficult to enforce because you'll spend all your time chasing infringers and b) induce people to try to use an imperfect replacement for your service (like Google or other) because citation becomes too cumbersome.
You can resolve a and b by simply making citation automated in some way. I would be absolutely for that: I'd love to use results from Wolfram|Alpha in my work, but I doubt I'm going to want to chase down the citation every time. I don't think you want to burden "distribution" of your results: I think you therefore need to find a way to make it easy for users to show that the results came from your service, without making them do all the legwork. I'm not smart enough to know how to do that, but I think you/your team probably are/is.
The point, in short, is not whether Wolfram|Alpha has the right to do this, but simply that doing so may negatively impact adoption of its service. It's similar to copyright assignment in open source: David Neary recently made the compelling argument that copyright assignation can hurt community adoption of open-source software, but that companies may need to do it, anyway.
It's a trade-off, but in Wolfram|Alpha's case, I believe there are ways for it to make this trade-off less burdensome on users, thereby inviting participation and not unduly hampering it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Given the ungainly hand that has held the rudder of Facebook's privacy policies--most recently with its alleged landgrab on user data--it's welcome to now see Facebook letting its users have considerable say in how the company handles their privacy.
In a bold move, Facebook has "open sourced" its terms of service to allow users to help define them for the social-networking service.
Facebook has proposed a new set of Facebook Principles, as well as a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, and is inviting users to comment upon them and thereby help to shape them.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the move "fairly unprecedented," and he's right. It's also a welcome departure from the company's ill-fated attempts in the past to foist things like Beacon on the world with little public input.
Given the amount of personal data Facebook holds, it's critical that the processes governing collection and use of that data be somewhat open. A little transparency should go a long way toward making Facebook's privacy policies palatable.
In the face of mounting criticism over its change to its terms of service, Facebook has reverted to its original terms of service, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology. It's a nice about-face, but it also misses the point.
The point, as Techdirt intimates, is transparency.
It's hard to think that nobody at Facebook anticipated it and took some proactive steps to address the changes and attempt to allay concerns and preclude the overreaction.
Instead, Zuckerberg responds only after the fuss has been kicked up, and his explanation comes off as damage control, regardless of the motivations behind it or the TOS change...The point isn't that Facebook or any other company shouldn't change their TOS to better reflect their businesses and technology, but that in this day and age, any "minor" change is going to attract lots of scrutiny, and, in all likelihood, will be misunderstood and misinterpreted. This makes the handling of the change much more important than the change itself.
In the Internet Age, companies need to assume that any changes they make to policies, procedures, etc. will become public, and act accordingly. It's no longer a matter of what is legally required to be divulged, but what is socially responsible to divulge.
Transparency, for example, would have served IBM and Novell well in their recent layoffs. Legally, neither was required to publicly announce the layoffs because the number of employees affected wasn't material to the business. But "material" is in the eye of the beholder, and by not talking openly (inside or outside the companies) about the layoffs, both Novell and IBM ended up fanning the flames of rumor. It's unrealistic to expect such events to happen quietly: the Internet is too noisy.
The point is transparency--doing more than the law requires one to do. The alternative is perpetual damage control, which seems to be Facebook's modus operandi. This reminds me of a comment from The Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People who, commenting on a self-righteous but flawed woman, says, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
I've read reports that only the media and privacy advocates care; that the terms-of-service change didn't matter to the rank-and-file users of Facebook.
This may be true, but that's equally true for just about any important (and many unimportant) issue. We rely on the media and interest groups to ferret out those things that "don't feel quite right" in politics and business.
Companies need to be more transparent. The Internet will force them to be so, but as with Facebook, transparency looks much better when it's voluntary rather than forced.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
While most of the activities on Facebook count as spam or worse ("super poke," anyone?), it's likely that such friending and poking was intended to be private. Recently, however, Facebook changed its terms of service to ensure it has perpetual rights on personal content, including content deleted by its users, as The Consumerist reports:
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings....
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
Facebook has always retained the rights to profit from its users' content, but now it retains the right to use old content that its users may have deleted.
Google has had its own problems with user privacy, but this Facebook move calls into question the wisdom of clouds or, rather, storing one's data in others' Web services like Facebook. We need to come up with new licenses or new mandates for open data in the cloud. Facebook shouldn't own our data.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
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