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

reuters.com

121–130 of 131 posts

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

#121

So consider this near-future scenario: You have a soccer match in which a lot of fans show up with cameras. Either like a Go-Pro or just their phones, or like Google Glasses. From the many fan cams, you can reconstruct the state of the match. From the FIFA video games, or from image analysis, you have all the player likenesses. So then someone could "watch" the game from any vantage point, using just the "facts" of t…

I'm failing to see what's wrong with this. I also don't see how an organization like the NBA or FIFA or whoever can make a claim to "own" the events of a game.

The sale of exclusivity rights seems like the scam: The premise that one can copyright an event itself and not just a particular recording of it.

If someone is there and recording I say that should be OK. If another person aggregates the views of multiple such recorders then they would need to obtain permission from each.

Reconstructing the entirety of a game with virtual players is already legal and amounts to an original work. Where's the problem?

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I could still go to a concert and publish the notes, pitches and timings of the sounds I heard because those are just facts not fixed to a medium like the chess moves here?

It seems you would be allowed to do that, but good luck with doing that in real time. First recording it and transcribing it in that way afterwards is not allowed.

You could probably do it for stuff like country reasonably easily with some kind of steno setup.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

modern chess programs are vastly superior to human players, regardless of one or 38 cores. stockfish has a elo rating of ~3350 (probably a little higher when running on 38 cores, not sure). carlsen has 2850. that corresponds with a 95% winning probability per game (or to be more precise: stockfish is expected to win 95% of all possible points over several chess matches) it's hard to say if that's close to "perfect an…

I'm not saying Stockfish isn't stronger than any human player (even the world champion), but you can't compare ratings in two different systems like that. Magnus has never played a FIDE-rated game with Stockfish, nor has Stockfish played any rated games with a human opponent.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that playing chess is an uncreative task - it's very creative. Describing the chessboard position is an uncreative task. Evaluating the relative strength of the players' positions can be creative. But the position of the pieces? No.

You are not getting a very important distinction: no creative effort (not even a kernel of creativity[1]) is embodied in telephone numbers. There is something though about the creative expression of chess board positions: they are EXTREMELY limited in terms of entropy. In coordinate notation 64*64 = 4096 choices would define either side's move, so given a dictionary of 4096 words, any typical chess game would be unde…

The distinction is that the music is being composed as a creative activity and the notes are the essence of the production. The chess game is a game, winning is the game, and the notation is just one of many possible transcriptions of it.

If you composed a poem from chess notation, it would be copyrightable.

If you transcribed a chess game (mechanically) with a series of notes, it would not be.

And besides, if there was creativity (for its own sake) in the process and the moves were copyrightable it would be the players, not the stenographer, that owned it.

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

#125
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.

PGA Tour banned cell phones until 2011: http://www.golf.com/ap-news/tour-allow-cell-phones-tournamen...

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

#126
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is unusual in having database rights, most countries don't respect them to that extent.

All EU countries have it.

In the UK the assembly of facts is copyrighted, in the rest only the structure, design and any comments or similar.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Are you always this hostile, or just to random people whom you have never met?

Anyways...

What I should have said is that you can copyright a presentation/display of facts, assuming it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression", and that copyright gives you exclusive rights to that particular presentation. However, the facts themselves don't become copyrighted merely because they've been fixed in some form. Therefore, the fact that someone else has "fixed" the moves on a website, video recording, or cuniform table is irrelevant. Incidentally, the phrase "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" is important because it is literally the wording of the law.

When I wrote arrangement, I was imagining something like the layout of a table. If you, for example, generated a little diagram showing how the board changed after each move, those diagrams would be copyrightable, since you've arranged them in a specific creative way (you chose these icons, that layout, etc).

The arrangement of the data in a broader sense (i.e., curation) can make it copyrightable, but it has to involve some element of curation. For example, in Key Publications, Inc. v. Chinatown Today Pub. Enters, the Court held that a curated list of businesses (in this case, businesses that were thought to be especially support of or relevant to a Chinese-American community) was sufficiently creative to be copyrightable. However, the bar is low, but it is not zero. Under Feist, an obvious arrangement (alphabetical order) was not original enough for protection. I would argue that putting a sequence events in the order that they occurred is much closer to Feist. In fact, I'd argue that any other ordering would actually be closer to copyrightable (e.g., "Top 25 Chess Blunders of 2016").

The obvious counter-argument, which you seem to be making, is that if you're allowed to list facts in some naturally-occurring order, then you shouldn't be able to copyright anything, because you can just spam out a description of the contents: "An audio file containing "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, when encoded using the default settings for libFLAC, starts with 3 frames of silence. This is followed verbatim block containing the following values....F"

These are facts, literally speaking, but they're vacuous. No one would be interested in them absent an attempt to reproduce the underlying work whose copyright you're (not) avoiding infringing. In contrast, the moves made during a match are of more general interest. This is a admittedly a grey area, but it's not particularly grey--maybe it's more off-white--and the law is full of grey areas and judgement calls.

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

#128
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.

I've been trying to mull that out as well from an economic perspective but I think it's highly dependent on the existing distribution networks which adds additional complexity.

Major League sports information is disseminated fairly quickly and the attendance levels make technological prohibitions a challenge. The nature of world chess championships make it a little different, as long as the globally recognized top ranked players are in attendance (preventing an organizational schism) I think the organizers could do whatever they want.

In the end I think this ruling just means they can't enforce a civil penalty for violation of these rules, but there's no reason they can't expel the violator from their event.

It's an interesting case.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not getting a very important distinction: no creative effort (not even a kernel of creativity[1]) is embodied in telephone numbers. There is something though about the creative expression of chess board positions: they are EXTREMELY limited in terms of entropy. In coordinate notation 64*64 = 4096 choices would define either side's move, so given a dictionary of 4096 words, any typical chess game would be unde…

The distinction is that the music is being composed as a creative activity and the notes are the essence of the production. The chess game is a game, winning is the game, and the notation is just one of many possible transcriptions of it. If you composed a poem from chess notation, it would be copyrightable. If you transcribed a chess game (mechanically) with a series of notes, it would not be. And besides, if there…

agree with everything you stated, ESPECIALLY the last sentence.

In an alternative reality where the players agreed that they were creating a creative work together, and signed the copyright to it over contractually, would your attitude change?

Can you talk a little bit about why a very short riff such as 10-12 notes of this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLCa0YG1ZI&t=57s

should be subject to copyright? (I also may be mistaken factually - perhaps it's not subject to copyright.)

As you can see from that video, there really are very few choices regarding the "next note". Maybe a few more choices than the possible legal moves on a board - but not by much.

>If you transcribed a chess game (mechanically) with a series of notes, it would not be.

I find this very very hard to believe. If I came up with simple rules for transcribing a chess game with notes and then discovered that for a particular chess game this was pleasant, you really don't think I could copyright that tune?

I'd be shocked if that were the case.

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction is that the music is being composed as a creative activity and the notes are the essence of the production. The chess game is a game, winning is the game, and the notation is just one of many possible transcriptions of it. If you composed a poem from chess notation, it would be copyrightable. If you transcribed a chess game (mechanically) with a series of notes, it would not be. And besides, if there…

agree with everything you stated, ESPECIALLY the last sentence. In an alternative reality where the players agreed that they were creating a creative work together, and signed the copyright to it over contractually, would your attitude change? Can you talk a little bit about why a very short riff such as 10-12 notes of this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLCa0YG1ZI&t=57s should be subject to copyright? (I also m…

> In an alternative reality where the players agreed that they were creating a creative work together, and signed the copyright to it over contractually, would your attitude change?

Yes, that would probably be the same (in general) as any other work-for-hire.

> Can you talk a little bit about why a very short riff such as 10-12 notes of this [...] should be subject to copyright?

I imagine it is subject to copyright, a Haiku would be.

The grey areas here are that such a short sequence lends itself to brute-forcing which isn't creative and probably wouldn't result in a copyright, and that independent creators would each have their own copyright. You can't just generate all possible books (even if not combinatorially impossible) and block authors from writing them.

> I find this very very hard to believe. If I came up with simple rules for transcribing a chess game with notes and then discovered that for a particular chess game this was pleasant, you really don't think I could copyright that tune?

Your program to do this would be copyrightable, but it would only produce a machine-translation (by definition) of the chess game so while the end results (the tune) be copyrightable, it wouldn't be your copyright.

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