The problem with the Wolfram Alpha terms of service is that they forbid natural, common uses of the web site.
"The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time."
Think for a minute what that forbids. Generating links programmatically, yes. Tweeting links? Yes. Emailing a URL? yes. Bookmarks? Oh, yeah...
Enforceability of the ToS aside, I think the original author is correct: that phrase in the Terms of Use shows that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't "get" the way the web works. Or at least they give too much free reign to lawyers who don't get it.
Tweeting a link seems like a good example of a "common sense use of the website" that could bring it to its knees if some queries take 30+ seconds to complete.
If WA lived up to its promise—which it doesn't, not by a long shot—then 30 seconds would definitely be an acceptable wait for the perfect answer. I don't see how it would bring anything to its knees? Why should the latency propagate? Just need a loading page, problem solved.
>The problem with the Wolfram Alpha terms of service is that they forbid natural, common uses of the web site.
It seems that that only applies to general circumstance usage. That is, it appears, once can enter into arrangements with W|A to allow non-human usage of website.
To prove, just search for "calories in apples", for example in Bing or Google search.
He says they are "totally within their rights", but he is wrong. He's making links to their web pages. They are not "totally within their rights" to try to forbid that.
As I read this, he's not making links to their web pages. He's deep linking to their content and displaying it within what appears to be a custom browser. While there is plenty of debate about the propriety of deep linking and whether sites have the right to bar deep linking, displaying content within a custom browser is analogous to 'framing' content without permission, and framing content a no-no.
Creating deep links to their content would be launching Mobile Safari with their content in it.
Now, it could be that after he talks to them and they have a look at his app, they decide that yes, he's framing their content but he does so in a manner they feel is in their best interests and is compatible with their business model as they see it. In which case, they will give him written permission to do so.
I'm dubious about this idea that web site owners have the right to dictate which web browsers their users are permitted to use to access their site, but it's certainly more colorable than a complaint about launching Mobile Safari with their page. It could be passing off, if nothing else.
I know, it's hard to draw a nice objective line in the sand. A general-purpose browser with a new UI, for example, ought to be allowed without requiring permission from anyone.
On the other hand, what if I write an iOS app just for getting answers from Wolfram|Alpha that displays the content using Webkit? I could certainly understand Wolfram arguing this kind of thing requires permission.
I'm curious about DuckDuckGo's use of Wolfram|Alpha content. There's an example of framing content and deep linking together. I assume they have permission or an army of lawyers?
2 points by agiletortoise 1 hour ago | link [dead]
I expect they are. In retrospect, I should have asked first.
It something like going to a dinner party and having the host throw you out for placing your fork to the left of the plate, because they put them on the right at their house. Runs contrary to expectations.
--agiletortoise
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This doesn't look offensive to me, so I presume it's a glitch. It would be ironic if it was killed because of the signature at the end in violation of local norms. :)
Is there any way to see the justification for killing a comment?
I trust HN's moderators, but it makes me uneasy to realize that there is a whole collection of censored comments that I didn't see until now, because I had showdead disabled.
I'm curious about some threads that get killed, too--afaik it can happen due to mod intervention or when the community hits "flag" enough times, but I always wonder which one it was.
What is the difference between "linking" and "deep linking"? Whatever else W|A is, it is a web server and it responds to my requests by sending me web pages. Why does Wolfram get to decide for me which web browser I should use to view those pages?
On a slightly related note, what do you think about framing another site's contents? The original article is closer to framing in this respect, i.e. showing stuff in a UIWebView is more analogous to framing.
I am currently developing a content aggregator site, but haven't decided how to link/display original articles. Should I be putting a frame at the top (or display orignal content in an iframe?) so that users don't leave my site, or should I directly link to the original article? I have strong suspicion that doing the former would be unfair, but some sites like stumbleupon do it to improve user experience.
It is similar to the difference between "citing" and "copying"/"plagiarizing": a gradual thing where the distinction is clear at extreme ends of the scale, but muddy in the middle.
There may be cases where linking violates copyright (Total News seems reasonable, although that's really probably more of a trademark issue), but I think the main problem is that most judiciaries and legislatures are a bit unclear on how the internet works.
However, I'm also in a better position than judiciaries and legislatures, since I'm talking about right and wrong, not legal and illegal.
Ah OK. I was thinking of rights in the sense of "rights enshrined in law," as in "European Convention on Human Rights," rather than what is ethically or morally right.
> You can put "Users may not breathe while using this website" in your ToS but that doesn't make it enforceable. A ToS has to have some basis in law.
You seem to be confusing copyright law with contract law. ToS are generally considered part of contract law, under which anything that is not illegal can be part of the contract, and the parties agreeing to the contract would be obligated to comply.
There are exceptions to enforceability (like contracts of adhesion and unconscionable terms, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_form_contract) that may limit enforceability of a contract or terms of use, but "basis in law" is not necessarily required.
In contrast, copyrights (and patents, and trademarks) involve certain rights granted by law and explicit and unstated limitations to those rights. Owners of copyrights/patents/trademarks may make assertions that go beyond their rights and are thus not enforceable as they have no basis in law.
In the Wolfram|Alpha case, then, the questions involve (a) does linking to a site constitute acceptance of the terms of use? (b) does using the site constitute acceptance of the ToU? (c) are the terms actually an enforceable contract (not illusory/unconscionable).
It would seem that the person violating the ToU is the user of the app, not the application writer. Using Apple to enforce this seems to be quite a stretch.
If you want to say creating a deep link is a copyright violation, then any browser which allows bookmarking is in violation?
In the US you don't have to sign a contract or be part of an agreement to be bound by it. For example, if an MS exec has a noncompete and Google hires him, knowing about the contract, but not being party to it, Google can still be sued.
I have trouble believing this is the case. Perhaps only in a very limited set of circumstances. Can you give us some references?
The reason I doubt it is that it opens a huge can of worms about how I could entrap a third-party into a contract that they haven't accepted and haven't exchanged consideration for.
" If your non-compete is valid, then a third party who induces you to break it can face the same liability as you, and possiby more. To avoid this liability, the new employer will often terminate the new employee, which it is free to do."
b) Would it be illegal to put up a website and say that essentially no one can use it? Aside from some exceptions like discrimination, ToS's define how you can use a tool, which is exactly what they were doing. Is there some law stating that if you host a website, you must allow users to link to it in any way they like?
There is a serious legal question about whether or not a ToS for a website is enforceable. Probably, if ANY ToS is enforceable then this one is. But it's an open question. The argument against enforceability goes something like this:
TOS enforcement stems from contract law. A principle of contract law says that a contract is binding on both parties if they agreed to it, but there must be SOME benefit to each party. A TOS between a website and its users clearly meets this threshold, but in this case agiletortoise didn't gain any benefit from the website -- he simply wrote a program that directed the user's browser to go there.
That being said, the best solution is the one that agiletortoise used: simply direct people to someplace less hostile, like Google, Bing, or Wikipedia, instead of Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha loses, everyone else wins.
Yes, I got a benefit. There were users that like the Wolfram links and will be sorry they are gone.
As I said in my post, I'm fine with it. I think Wolfram's Terms are OK. I think it's a bit tenuous only in that if they were really serious about it, they could enforce that requirement in their code. They are not doing that, because it's to their benefit to allow some linking -- they are just reserving the right to selective enforce those terms, which seems a bit sleazy to me.
I think there is a very plausible argument to be made that it was your CUSTOMERS who benefited, not you.
In other words, I think that if Wolfram chose to sue you for thousands of dollars plus court costs because you violated your contract with them that you would be able to say, in defense, "I never agreed to anything." Since Wolfram delivered the goods (some answers, in this case) to the USERS of your application, not to you, I think this might be a valid defense.
Of course, the strictures of polite behavior extend further than the iron force of the law. Polite behavior suggests that when they ask you not to link to them you shouldn't... which is exactly what you did.
I don't know your product, but if your link takes them to the actual Alpha page, and they can interact with the Alpha page, you should make the argument that you're bringing them customers. I think if they're reasonable, they may actually appreciate the traffic in that case.
> Is there some law stating that if you host a website
You're looking at this backwards.
The TOS is not a contract that automatically applies to everyone; I don't have to agree to it if I link to your site.
Generally, if you want to prevent people from using your website in a certain way (that's not blatant abuse/hacking/etc), you're going to have to resort to technical solutions, because your only legal recourse is copyright law, which may or may not apply.
>Is there some law stating that if you host a website, you must allow users to link to it in any way they like?
None that I know of specifically - however putting a website up is an implicit contract allowing normal web usage (for credits: now define normal and enforce that contract).
I don't think you have to bring implicit contracts into it. If I walk down the street and someone's shadow falls on me, I simply don't have a cause of action against them. If someone looks at me, I don't have a cause of action against them. If someone calls my name on the street, I don't have a cause of action against them. (Barring extraordinary circumstances, of course.) You don't need to invent theories about how I'm entering into an implicit contract with the whole world by going out on the street, among whose terms are that people may allow their shadows to fall on me and look at me. It's simply that no tort is created by looking at a person or linking to a web page.
There's no law granting exclusive rights in URLs unless they're copyrightable.
I like your example but I don't think that a web page is like a person in public space. As you say their is no tort generally in approaching someone in the street but it is possible that a legal barrier has been erected and so an uninformed observer can't assume that no infringing/illegal activity is being undertaken (think exclusion orders, stalker laws, anti-social behaviour orders and the like; I think these are reasonably common across jurisdictions).
In the case of a website a copyright to that site is automatically created when the work itself is created - this is true in the vast majority of countries at least. Being able to view the site by making a temporary copy in your computer's cache is not clearly non-infringing. Someone aiding the creation of an infringing work can be acting tortuously in "contributory infringement" and hence linking to a website could, strictly, be tortuous. Applying common sense by assuming an implicit contract avoids the need to concern oneself with such apparent infringing actions.
> Being able to view the site by making a temporary copy in your computer's cache is not clearly non-infringing. Someone aiding the creation of an infringing work can be acting tortuously in "contributory infringement" and hence linking to a website could, strictly, be tortuous.
Hmm, I hadn't thought about it from that point of view, but I think you're right. It seems like clear evidence that your copyright law (I assume you're in the US) has gone mad and needs to be put to sleep.
I think it's important to note that many queries on Wolfram Alpha are VERY heavyweight--I've had complex calculations and rendering take 30 seconds to a minute to finish. It's not like Google where a query get a result in a few milliseconds. So while Terminology is not likely to be querying it with lots of formulas, I think the policy exists so a badly thought out automated querier can't accidentally put a huge load on Wolfram's engine.
(oh noes!) gives an image containing '7'. They could just freaking put a 7.
Granted, not all of their queries could be done this way, and some of those could indeed be done with canvas, for example. Dunno if those would be faster. But all of the numbers and tables could stand to just be numbers and tables.
This is more of a gripe about copy/paste than performance, really: I'd imagine their calculations take a lot longer than making a .png
Just to qualify that, since apparently it wasn't clear. If their site is that prone to dos'ing, they would probably use something other than a tos to protect it with.
A lot of people in this thread are concerned about the TOS and whether or not it is enforceable. But did anyone notice that he claims wolfram served apple a DCMA notice for the app? That law was supposed to be for copyrighted artwork. Aren't wolfram alpha, and other sort of dynamic procedural output from websites more of a service than an artwork (or a 'work' as it is probably termed in the DMCA? It seems a bit pretentious to refer to the output of something like wolfram, google, etc. as a 'work.' I could see a website in it's entirety as a 'work.' But the output of a service doesn't strike me as a 'work.')
The EFF has been doing some good work on TOS abuse. https://www.eff.org/issues/terms-of-abuse
I'm sure they would be interested because this linking policy is absurd. There is no way a practice like this would be 'illegal' anywhere but on Apple's app store where I imagine Wolfram Alpha holds at least a little sway.
[off-topic] Assuming it was a shortened link, Twitter's new interface solved this issue by dynamically generating title="" tags that display the full URL on:hover.
Anyone aware of a good solution for this? Shortener API's + An open source script?
I am sure with infinite money on both sides, if this were litigated, the OP would win. You have the right to write a computer program that sends an HTTP request to a site, even if the site's ToU say that you can't. After all, you can send a request without having ever read or seen the ToU.
The server should simply refuse to reply if the user has not agreed to the terms of use.
Apple will do what Wolfram says, but that's because Apple is acting in its best financial interests (30% of $1.99 for WA's app), not because Apple is legally bound to not distribute an app that links to Wolfram Apple.
These ToS clauses protect their paid iPhone app from being replicated in the browser, which is pretty much exactly what you did. So it is effectively you who didn't get it :)
Which gets to the root of the Wolfram's real issue with it: If you go to wolframalpha.com on an iOS device, you are shown an ad for their $1.99 app (which you can ignore and continue to the mobile version of their site).
If you go straight to a query, it bypasses this.
The O.P.'s app bypasses their ad, and Wolfram doesn't like that.
Why doesn't Wolfram just block this? It would be a little bit of work, A naive solution is to use short-lived cookies. But there are more sophisticated means to ensure that users get to the result page via a query.
It seems to me that agile tortoise doesn't "get it". Regardless of Wolfram Alpha's licence, it's Wolfram's decision as to what you can and can't do. That was made clear in the licence.
The bottom line is that Agile Tortoise didn't study the licence hard enough, if he had he would've seen that Wolfram Alpha wasn't the right fit for his tool. If he'd have looked further he'd have probably seen that http://duckduckgo.com/ has an API that he may well have been able to use to get the same results.
Instead he may now have to modify his software and probably resubmit it to Apple for review.
Measure twice, cut once. This applies as much to software licensing as carpentry.
(1) semantics (fun for the whole family!) what does deep linking mean in this context? We all say deep linking is bad, but to some the pre-populated query isn't deep linking, but to others it is.
(2) one of the (entirely sensible) things the Wolfram Alpha guys seem to be saying is "please don't hook bots up to us". Now no doubt some will bluster and say that if it is there in public they have a right to consume all the bandwidth and resources - after all if they didn't want people to do that they should just [insert complex but fragile technological solution that would quickly fail or be worked around]. As it happens, what this guy was doing falls into that category of automated client.
So on the basis of either one of those (if you squint real hard) I can see Wolfram Alpha's point of view.
Not in defense of Wolfram Alpha, I'm just curious if W|A does this out of concern of possible degeneration effect on their search accuracy caused by programmed search queries? For a human user of W|A, he will construct the query with certain syntax, and further drill down the search query with W|A's recommendations. W|A may very well monitor the pattern of user search queries to optimize their search algorithm. It is possible that programmed search queries, especially coming from a third party application where users do not use the W|A like syntax, may "pollute" the usage pattern for W|A and affect their algorithm's efficiency. Just my 2 cents.
I am not a Terminology user, and I do have the Alpha app on my iPhone. But I still think this is foolishness on the part of Wolfram. I am more likely to use W|A if I can click on a button and jump straight to the page I want, then if I need to switch apps myself and retype my query.
It's not clear to me why the author should be bound by terms of service that he never agreed to.
A web request is merely a communication with the web server. The server is free to do what it wills with such a request. If Wolfram doesn't want to respond to requests from the author's apps, that's well within their rights. Similarly if they do respond, it's because they explicitly set it up to so respond.
You read every ToS for every service/product you use?
Community and social standards often trump legalese. For instance, most absurd restrictions in apartment rental agreements are not enforceable.
In this case, linking to another site, no matter how "deep" the link is, is common practice.
If WA really doesn't like it, they can prevent it by checking the referrer, or going even further by adding a pseudorandom token to their query page, switched every 5 minutes and valid for an hour or a day, and redirecting deep links which don't have a valid token.
Of course, doing that would probably kill some traffic they like, so they have a silly, selectively-enforced and probably unenforceable ToS clause instead.
I don't see any reason why such provisions need to be enforced legally, since they can be enforced technologically in most cases. Expanding the law because of laziness is a horrible precedent.
I find it amusing that people downvote my comment. I guess it is much more rewarding to upvote overinflated stories about how Evil Wolfram Alpha "Doesn't Get It" (often without reading the story, I suspect). Makes for better drama.
Frankly, I would much rather read about a 2-bit adder implemented using 36 555 timers.
> You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Ignorance is NOT an excuse.
While this is technically true, I feel that it has slipped to the level of a polite fiction rather than a core civic principle. People pretty much never read contracts anymore because they've gotten so long and dense, and the contract writers know this and make them longer and denser anyway. Apple, among others, presumes you won't actually read their agreement before clicking through---they don't bother to sync up the printable version, don't provide a diff, and their system times out before you could possibly have read even a small part of the document. (I've written about this before, at some length: http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html .)
You're making an assumption that Wolfram Alpha has any right to specify how they are linked to. You can only "break the rules" if you believe this is a rule in the first place.
Are there really adults reading hacker news with skins thin enough to be offended by his post? Perhaps e have a lot of web-monkeys who have a business plan to deep-link?
Antagonises means "in opposition to" or more commonly "to incur the dislike of." Offends means something else entirely. Writing can easily incur people's dislike without offending them personally. For example, on most forums, excessive use of all caps will antagonise people even if they agree with what is written.
I assume it's because other people noticed the part where he said that he missed that part of the ToS, even though he checked for funky terms. It's pretty normal to be able to link to a website and terms forbidding that are abnormal.
So, yeah, he goofed a bit, but they could have been more flexible.
I'm saying that he did something wrong and he's paying for it. Do you disagree? Do you think they should just let this slide? He didn't follow their TOS, so they should just say "whatever" and let it go? Wolfram has a responsibility to uphold their TOS so that it doesn't get abused.
My point is that I see a lot of posts around here where people go on rants about how they got screwed by a TOS, but the BOTTOM LINE is that they weren't thorough. They didn't do their due-dilligence. They didn't read the TOS, they didn't contact the company who's systems they are using, or some other small detail was missed. Rarely do we see a legitimate reason why someone is RIGHT after they got hit by a company for not complying with a TOS.
Look at companies trying to sell "market" apps in the Android Market, or everyone who is complaining about having to give Apple a cut of their SaaS revenues. The TERMS in the TOS agreements didn't change in most of these cases, but people are complaining when all of a sudden they have to pay the price for not reading, missing, misinterpreting, or ignoring the rules.
But hey, I get get downvoted for having a legitimate opinion, and you can get up votes for calling me an asshole.
It used to be fun here. I used to be able to have an opinion and people would praise the fact that I can look at something from another angle, be the devils advocate. But now, if I don't have a hive mind I'm an asshole.
Please don't call people on Hacker News assholes, even by analogy.
I think you might be attempting to say something quite relevant without intentionally calling the person an asshole, but if that's the case, you ought to have explained it in your post.
"The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time."
Think for a minute what that forbids. Generating links programmatically, yes. Tweeting links? Yes. Emailing a URL? yes. Bookmarks? Oh, yeah...
Enforceability of the ToS aside, I think the original author is correct: that phrase in the Terms of Use shows that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't "get" the way the web works. Or at least they give too much free reign to lawyers who don't get it.