Win for Open-Source Legally: Settlement Reached in Stockfish vs. ChessBase

Courts only interpret laws, they can’t make one (except for the constitutional court that can make decisions with law-like quality that have direct binding effect)

Now, lawyers and courts often look at how other courts decided in similar cases and point to those decisions and the legal reasoning laid out by the court, but it is common that even even the higher levels of courts disagree on a subject.

Even higher court decisions have no binding effect in other cases to other courts, including lower courts. It’s not uncommon that lower courts diverge from decisions of their direct appeal courts - the Landgericht Hamburg is pretty notorious for having its decisions in press matters regularly overturned on appeal.

Title of article: Settlement Reached in Stockfish v ChessBase

Was the title edited, or is this editorialism? Also:

> The agreement also includes the necessity to hire a Free Software Compliance Officer to assure that further violations do not occur. Critically, the agreement includes no financial compensation for the Stockfish team, not even legal fees. There are fines for violating the settlement, but they would be paid to the Free Software Foundation Europe and not the Stockfish team.

- Chessbase's CEO on their official blog (now deleted) stated that they developed the engine from scratch. They also took a newer version for ripoff and compared it to an older version of Stockfish to claim their Fat Fritz 2/Houdini 6 engines are powerful.

- However lousy their terms are, free software licenses are enforceable by law. It will set an example. Since we are on the topic of chess, a threat is always more assertive than execution. Big tech joined FOSS forces for one simple reason - they could lose more than they could win.

- Stockfish did not suffer significant monetary damage since they don't have a commercial product people already insinuated that there would be no extraordinary financial settlement.

> need to settle than argue the legality It is a vague and circumstantial argument. In practical terms, since it's already been ~1.5 years, a settlement (1-year leverage + entire credit + foss.chessbase.com + GPL enforcement) is enough for the plaintiff. Also, the only time the defendant in a lawsuit agrees to settle out of court is when they expect the trial to be more expensive than the settlement. Generally, this happens when the plaintiff's case is so strong that the defendant is confident the plaintiff will win in court. I agree with the no-one-sided landslide victory; that's what settlement means. Would you not say, given the settlement terms, Stockfish (GPL enforcement) won? The entire open-source community base those enforcements.

I see this as an absolute win.

Plus, some money would be even better. Agreed.

One of the games was similar to a spelling bee: the facilitator said a word out loud, and each team had to try to write it correctly on a flipchart.

There are many thousands of Chinese characters. So, even though the folks in my team were smart enough to be FAANG engineers, and were young enough not to have forgotten everything they learned at school+university, there was a lot of head-scratching and second-guessing going on.