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Our lawsuit against ChessBase

stockfishchess.org

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Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#71

Post by setpatchaddress »

mehrdada wrote: post #58
ghshephard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any company past circa 2002sh or so, and definitely by 2005, is intimately aware of their intellectual property responsibilities, and, it's the opposite problem that I've run into - in which tons of strawmen are thrown up as to the danger of infecting products with open source licenses makes it dangerous to touch the code. One of the reasons why BSD licenses are so attractive to corporations, is that they run the low…

> GPLv3 is obviously a non-starter for most companies "Non-starter" is a gross mischaracterization for GPLv3 for most companies , even most software companies, considering there is quite a bit of GPLv3 software in a modern GNU+Linux distro that they likely rely on.

I think the parent is referring to the code they ship as part of their own products, which for most companies is definitely not GPL3 if they can avoid it.

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#72

Post by tzs »

whocares2345 wrote: post #66

I bet it’s next to impossible to prove copyright in this case. You would need to track down every last contributor and create a legally valid authorship evidence that is recognized under German legal doctrine. I would bet that having a email or even full name in a git repository is certainly not enough. This is exactly why for serious open-source projects that big companies depend on, they always creat a legal body,…

> I bet it’s next to impossible to prove copyright in this case. You would need to track down every last contributor and create a legally valid authorship evidence that is recognized under German legal doctrine.

I don't see why they would need every last contributor. They only would need the contributors of the specific code that they allege was copied. That Stockfish contains other code by other contributors that may or may not have been copied would not be relevant.

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#73

Post by indymike »

alexfromapex wrote: post #56
wiz21c wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockfish has an opportunity to make money here. No?

It will be interesting, depends where jurisdiction falls and how that jurisdiction interprets any alleged damages since GPL content is normally released free of charge.

Copyright infringement can have large statutory damages that have nothing to do with the actual financial damage from the infringement.

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#75

Post by camjohnson26 »

FYI if anybody’s looking for a chessbase alternative I use a combination of SCID vs. PC, Caissabase, and Stockfish to roughly clone it. I’m sure chessbase has a lot more features but these alternatives are good enough for an amateur like me.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/scidvspc/ http://caissabase.co.uk/

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#77

Post by SahAssar »

sneak wrote: post #31
InvaderFizz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absent a license, ChessBase has no right to distribute any of the Stockfish code. This simply reverts the code to copyrighted content, much like a book.

Revert is not the correct term. GPL-licensed code is still and always copyrighted, even when GPL-licensed. The GPL is itself a copyright license. Only CC0/WTFPL/Public Domain are renunciations of copyright.

Even then, IIRC CC0 is not that easy to apply to code (even CC do not recommend it for that: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... ), WTFPL is entirely untested (even more so than GPL/MIT which are also not entirely tested in courts) and some regions do not recognize public domain. For example sqlite sells a license for what is public domain code partially for the reason of "You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the public domain" and "You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the right of authors to dedicate their work to the public domain".

Also, when it comes to code dedicated to public domain it is good to consider what wikipedia says about implied warranty: "The licensing process also allows authors, particularly software authors, the opportunity to explicitly deny any implied warranty that might give someone a basis for legal action against them." It is always good to include a clause saying that there is no warranty, implied or otherwise (unless of course you provide a warranty, which you probably should not do without restrictions on OSS code).

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#78

Post by dboreham »

gpm wrote: post #68
dmurray wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they've revoked even Chessbase's license to use the code. So, not like a book, where if you have the physical copy you can generally read it, but more like a pirated copy of Windows or Oracle, where you owe license fees per user, per core, per day.

I'm not sure if it's settled law on whether or not you need to license to use code...

I don't think it quite works that way: the license is really just an agreement between the user and the rights holder that they will not sue for infringement. So use without license really means "you may expect to be sued". The outcome of that suit would determine whether or not you "need to license to use code". I'm guessing there have been many cases where the copyright owners for some code sued someone for using it and won.

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#79

Post by yladiz »

indymike wrote: post #73
alexfromapex wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting, depends where jurisdiction falls and how that jurisdiction interprets any alleged damages since GPL content is normally released free of charge.

Copyright infringement can have large statutory damages that have nothing to do with the actual financial damage from the infringement.

Case in point, the awards given against people who pirate something like a movie which are completely detached from the actual damage caused by the piracy.

Re: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

#80

Post by shadeslayer_ »

parsecs wrote: post #44
SloopJon wrote: post #39

The current title is "Our lawsuit against ChessBase – Stockfish – open-source Chess Engine", which I found confusing. Is Stockfish being sued? Does it belong to ChessBase? I suggest sticking with the simpler title from the blog, "Our lawsuit against ChessBase".

Looks like OP didn't clean up the url while submitting, it defaulted to page title.

Or maybe they didn't editorialize it because HN frowns upon that sort of thing.
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