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U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#111

Post by kylecordes »

iaw wrote: post #72
seanalltogether wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v.... . > The district court held that Motorola and STATS did not infringe NBA's copyright because only facts from the broadcasts, not the broadcasts themselves were transmitted. The Second Circuit Court agreed with the district court's argument that the "[d]efendants provide purely factual information which any patron of an NBA game could acquire from the are…

I think this is a more correct case to apply. The Feist case was about the expense accrued in aggregating the information and the incentive issues that arise if those efforts are not protected. The NBA case was about the division of rights between the competition organizer and those attempting to report on it. Specifically, are the reporters required to delay their reporting efforts when the only information being re…

I wonder what the effect on attendance would be, if major sporting events had a "no cell phones" rule. My guess offhand: it would be devastating to ticket sales.

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#112

Post by gruez »

kylecordes wrote: post #111
iaw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a more correct case to apply. The Feist case was about the expense accrued in aggregating the information and the incentive issues that arise if those efforts are not protected. The NBA case was about the division of rights between the competition organizer and those attempting to report on it. Specifically, are the reporters required to delay their reporting efforts when the only information being re…

I wonder what the effect on attendance would be, if major sporting events had a "no cell phones" rule. My guess offhand: it would be devastating to ticket sales.

But then again, of most of the people going are hardcore fans, sales might not be affected to much (although there might be outrage)

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#113

Post by Retric »

logicallee wrote: post #95
Retric wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of choices, high level play also has a tiny fraction of the number of choices in practice. However, this has nothing to do with why it's protected or not. I can also make a clif notes version of Harry Potter describing what happened in detail. That's not what copywrite protects.

>I can also make a clif notes version of Harry Potter describing what happened in detail. That's not what copywrite protects. everyone can agree that summarizing a game is fine. We can also all agree that Chess games shouldn't be subject to copyright! So, I'm not disagreeing with you or anyone. As a very narrow technical issue, I would like to have a comparison between the number of choices (which key to play in; fir…

First you are ignoring chords and note timing which is an option. Second there are only 1,327 named openings and variants in chess many of them are known to be inferior so you do see a lot of repition in the beginnings and endings of Master level games.

As an order of magnitude each note in a melody is from a low end estimate of ~1,000,000 completely valid options though musical style will limit this.

Thus from an encoding standpoint a chess game is theoretically a much lower entropy. But, a sufficiently constrained melody may be lower but probably not. Consider an easy example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DtvNAQ8KOqI

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#114

Post by logicallee »

matt4077 wrote: post #99
Retric wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Events that happens are facts, creative representation of facts is copywritable but not mechanical translations. Thus you can't get a copywrite on the S&P's closing value, but you can on a story about it. Further, a program has multiple possible representations, you can copywrite the code in one of them, but not gain a separate one for the compiled code. PS: There are also many ways to generate code that don't create…

You're talking past each other. I think everyone agrees with the decision, but it is indeed a gray area. The S&P closing value isn't comparable because it's the product of a stochastic process. But even if there's a smart legal doctrine defining the difference between a chess game and two musicians writing a score, lets not pretend that such legal doctrines aren't created to arrive at the result that seems right. Not…

Thank you.

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#115

Post by logicallee »

Retric wrote: post #113
logicallee wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can also make a clif notes version of Harry Potter describing what happened in detail. That's not what copywrite protects. everyone can agree that summarizing a game is fine. We can also all agree that Chess games shouldn't be subject to copyright! So, I'm not disagreeing with you or anyone. As a very narrow technical issue, I would like to have a comparison between the number of choices (which key to play in; fir…

First you are ignoring chords and note timing which is an option. Second there are only 1,327 named openings and variants in chess many of them are known to be inferior so you do see a lot of repition in the beginnings and endings of Master level games. As an order of magnitude each note in a melody is from a low end estimate of ~1,000,000 completely valid options though musical style will limit this. Thus from an en…

This is totally splitting hairs and I don't think we're adding to the discussion anymore. if you'll drop me an email (see my profile, since you don't list one) I'll spit back my analysis but it's really really pedantic and actually probably not worth our time. thanks for the exchange here.

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#116

Post by JadeNB »

CalChris wrote: post #21
scott00 wrote: post #20

Anybody have a link to the complaint/application for a TRO? A lot of the comments here are talking about copyright law, but most protection or attempted protection of data is done with licensing agreements. I would guess FIDE could require the people viewing in person and on the FIDE website to agree to not disseminate accounts of the game as a condition of being allowed to watch. I'd be interested to learn if FIDE h…

I don't have that but the judge was pretty dismissive. From chessgames.com: In a hearing late in the day prior to the first game of the match, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero was not persuaded that organizers of the $1 million, 12-game tournament had a legal right to block the websites from disclosing the moves until after each game.(7) Rejecting virtually every argument that World Chess asserted, he said, "I know…

Just for reference, footnote (7) in your quote is a link to http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/11/10/us/ap-us-world-ch... .

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#117

Post by njharman »

jellicle wrote: post #71
dogma1138 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, other copyright laws do allow you to copy right a database or any other compiled work, as long as there was work that was conducted in order to create it. This means that if you compile a database of open source material the database itself can we protected by copyright even if all of it's content is not protected by any copyright and is in the public domain. This is why for example in the UK a phonebook c…

> as long as there was work Not work. Creativity. Big difference.

Do not think of laypersons idea of what creativity means. Legal definition of creativity is so broad there is very little difference. If human did it and it wasn't strictly a mechanical process (like copying), if any decision / choice was made that is "creativity".

The integer sequence 78, 34, 56, 99, 23 is creative enough for copyright (probably, don't know for certain until judge(s)->SCOTUS says so)

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#118

Post by njharman »

mattkrause wrote: post #52
njharman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can copyright a particular arrangement of facts (or other non-copyright protected content) where that arrangement required creative thought (even if "arrangement" is just layout as simple as page numbers/breaks). Notes are facts, but sheet music (and other representations) of sequence of notes, aka a song, are copyrightable. Why are a sequence of moves not the same? This ruling seems more about biases people have…

No, you can't copy facts, period. You can copyright facts that have been 'fixed in a tangible medium of expression' as long as there's some minimal element of creativity. Sheet music is copyrightable because the notes have been "fixed" onto a piece of paper. A recording of a band is copyrightable because the music has been "fixed" in the record, tape, CD, or other file. You can copyright a specific description of a c…

> You can copyright facts that have been 'fixed in a tangible medium of expression' as long as there's some minimal element of creativity.

Oh hey, that's what I said In my first sentence! see next for tangible which I assumed was so trivially obvious.

"You can copyright a particular arrangement of facts ... where that arrangement required creative thought"

tangible like, published on website, recorded (think don't have any cameras at top level chess tournaments do you?), or just written down on piece of paper Or do you also imagine no one organizing chess tournament doesn't do that either?

How can you be so biased and unimaginative? Are you just being disingenuous to win internet argument?

If I hadn't given away my copyright to it (this sights EULA) I could prevent you (via copyright) from taking the facts (words) of this sentence and presenting them in some other way (public performance, painting of them etc). If you took the facts (words) and rearranged them then no. But a specific sequence of chess moves, not a rearrangement of them is what we are discussing.

Same as the particular sequence of notes or chess moves might be made of facts the sequence itself is copyrightable.

If I transliterated musical notation into one that used chess moves, do you imagine I'd get away with publishing sheet music?

What magical property do you image chess moves have that musical notes don't?

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#119

Post by throwaway_yy2Di »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #101
throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #74

Apropos, to anyone who wants to watch the live moves, with expert commentary, they are here (this is the defendant from the Reuters story): https://chess24.com/en/read/news/chess24-win-moscow-case-ann... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTCNuQ2mGfW6-SpHpaze_g (direct link to livestream) If you're looking for live computer engine lines, Steinar Gunderson offers that here, with 38 cores running Stockfish: http://analy…

Regarding "38 cores": can anyone comment on whether that's sufficient to perfectly analyse the game in near-real-time, or is it just good enough to provide interesting analysis? I.e. would Stockfish running on 38 cores be competitive with / better than World Championship players?

It's easy to tell computer engines aren't analyzing perfectly, because when we tell to them to play themselves, they lose a large fraction of their games, as both colors. Perfect play would always force at least a draw from at least one side.

There's no known tractable way to solve chess. There's something like 10^120 move orders [0], and no known way to find perfect play without brute-forcing (almost) all of them. Chess engines can't solve to to the end of a game to see which moves are certain to win; they can only explore to a very shallow depth, and evaluate the horizon nodes by very human-like [1] approximate heuristics.

It looks perfect from a human PoV (the best human players have no chance of winning); but there's still an unimaginably large gulf between chess engines and mathematically perfect chess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

[1] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...

Re: U.S. judge rejects World Chess bid to block websites from airing moves

#120

Post by kuschku »

dmurray wrote: post #44
DrScump wrote: post #40

In broadcast and print media, there are "facts" which are routinely embargoed (they cannot be released before a certain date/time). Financial results from publicly-traded companies are similarly embargoed, even though they be simple facts. Why can't this mechanism be employed as a condition of being permitted to attend the event?

That is one of the mechanisms that they were relying on. Anyone attending the event and relaying moves is likely in breach of contract, and at least could be thrown out of the venue. Likewise, anyone who signed up for the official feed and then shared the moves is violating the website's terms and conditions and could get their account closed. But it only takes one anonymous user to sign up and report the moves to ot…

Not necessarily.

Person A opens the stream on their PC.

Unknown to them, Person B watches that stream through the window of Person A’s home, and broadcasts the information.

The only possible crime Person B did was invading Person A’s privacy, but Person A does not sue them.

Person A acted entirely legal, so did Person B, and you still got all the facts out.

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