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

> 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 arena without any involvement from the director, cameramen, or others who contribute to the originality of the broadcast" [939 F. Supp. at 1094].

Your post is good (but your link is broken, please go steal a better copypaste) and informative, but the point I'm making is that it's easier for people learning about this to see the underlying issues that courts grapple with if we stick to less loaded terms.

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?

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 this area of the law very well."

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=88069&crosstable...

This is kinda off-topic here, but this might even be technically a violation of the CFAA! Orin Kerr from Volokh Conspiracy has written about it many times, but it's not a serious possibility I guess.

Someone else with PACER access could easily obtain the order, but from the ABC article the argument is indeed that every visitor to the site agrees to not share the move information and therefore these other chess sites must have violated said agreement to obtain the move information. Chessgames's defense is that they don't get the data from the site, but instead from watching people on Twitter (there are multiple defendants though).

Edit: Wow, I need some sleep. I misread the OP, and the Wikipedia article to which I linked. I'll keep the comment up for posterity, but, yes, the company itself can put limitations in place but it's incredibly difficult to enforce.

You can't publicly broadcast facts. Then say no one else has the right to rebroadcast those same facts.

So you can't legally prevent someone from watching the official stream, then making a broadcast where they discuss facts that are relayed on that stream.

There might be an issue of legality concerning the embargo in which case the limitation is warranted.

So this is why I don't agree with your reasoning:

The fact is that Ambirex's comment at 11:22 PM Friday, November 11, 2016 UTC began with a capital T as his first move. Though he could have left it at that and left his opponents to reply, this was not his complete comment. The fact is, for the second letter of his comment he chose an 'h'. And the fact is, for the third letter, he chose an 'e'. The fact is, for the fourth character he had a space. The fact is, for the fifth character he had an 'm'. The fact is...

And so forth. So while these are certainly facts -- still, they are quite creative facts. More creative than the work you put into beginning your comment with "the main difference".

So while I actually happen to agree with you, this idea of the moves being "facts" versus acts of creative expression is dubious -- where is the hard line that separates that from my reproducing your comment (or any other copyrighted work) by reference to facts? They are facts, true, but they are also the creative output of two masters of the field.

In general for cases like this judges try to look at the pragmatics. This is why the judge is quoted as saying "He said the public interest would be served by 'robust reporting,' and analysis of the event."

The fact that for him this includes fully reproducing all the moves (which of course seriously impacts the market of the organizers - as well as reproducing the whole of the 'creative output', rather than just excerpts - both of which are important standards in copyright) is one that I can probably agree with.

But if he felt that the actual interests in the matter were another way, you bet that he could extend copyright protection to the creative work of playing a game. After all, it is rare for any game between grandmasters today to match one from a database. When they do, it is similar to when similar melodies are created independently.

In fact, a chess game likely has waaaaaaaay more entropy (I am making quite a technical argument) than very short melodies which are clearly protected by copyright and for which many "variations" are already owned by others.

Why are the "facts" of the melody more protected?

So I don't really agree with your interpretation. A fact would be like "white won" or "black won" -- rather than the creative output into the moves themselves. Though more creative than mere fact, I do agree with your conclusion -- for the same reasoning quoted in the article.

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 about art (music) and sport/game (chess) than about copyright law.

So what is the difference between two people playing chess and two people jamming (musical improv)? Both have limited moves, rules, structure, the creative input from two people. The chess moves are not copyrightable but the song notes are?

I actually think neither should be.

As far as I can tell, that's what's going on here: websites want to broadcast the "play-by-play" of the chess game, but not the actual game footage. Now, the play-by-play for a chess game is more important than the play-by-play for a hockey game, so I can see why the organizers of the chess tournament aren't happy, but I think the correct decision was made here.

What you're referring to is video broadcast rights. That's rather different. The World Chess Championship's rights on those weren't violated.

This is the equivalent of someone writing down the play-by-play in a game - and that would also be completely legal.

The facts of the game are not copyrighted and not copyrightable, which is why sites can do this. Similarly, the moves of a chess game are facts which are not copyrighted and not copyrightable, which is why sites can tell you in real time who's playing and what moves have been made.