The main difference between this and other sports/events is the moves are facts. They wouldn't be able to broadcast a live video feed. But you can copyright facts.
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.
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 chess match, as I've fixed it here: "You could hear a pin drop as Kasparov proceeded with the Spanish Opening, a favorite for the Russian..."
What you can't do is use copyright to prevent someone else from extracting the facts from this description (e4 e5, etc) and presenting them in some other way.
It's conceivable that andromeduck's distinction won't stand up in law, but you haven't addressed 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 can be protected by copyright but not in the US.
Not work. Creativity. Big difference.
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)
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?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
On the other hand, you might want to check out Corel v. Bridgeman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....
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 under a few hundred 'words': they're very very short creative expressions.
I would suggest that you compare them with musical melodies. they have about as much entropy. the database of existing melodies (or slight variations) is similar to the database of existing chess games.
in some cases melodies were held to be protected by copyright, so that you could not reproduce them in any form. I am not a lawyer, no. I researched many areas of intellectual property extensively. In general a basic melody might well be a "fact" about a song - yet a fact that you cannot use in your own song. (Similar to a patent.)
The judge, sensibly, chose not to extend the same protection to chess games. I agree with him! I just disagree with your reasoning. There's a reason the judge didn't advance it.
[1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
Kings have a maximum of 8 moves. 2 Rooks a maximum of 14 = 28, 2 bishops 12 = 24, and 2 knights 8 = 16, queen = 36. And this is individually on an actual board there is often less then 50 legal choices (ex: 20 for opening) and the average game is 40 move (pairs).
Thus you could encode most chess matches as a tweet.
I'd like to have you come back and compare chess games as actually played, with what has been held to be copyrighted simple melodies. I'd like to see that comparison and think you're good to go to make it.
Further they are not patents two people can in theory both have copyright on the same melody.
If you need a hint, see arguments e.g. here - http://gizmodo.com/5962375/is-it-possible-to-run-out-of-new-...
and elsewhere. While you say that timing between notes and note pitch and duration are all open, in fact there are relatively few choices in actual modern practice.
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; first note, its length; second note, its length; third note, its length; fourth note, its length) that goes into a melody that has been deemded legally protected, and a chess game.
Here is a protected riff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLCa0YG1ZI&t=57s
Now please focus on just the first 8 notes, after picking a "starting note". The number of choices for where the melody goes, in the key that is in, is rather constrained: what has more creativity, 8-9 of those notes, or an entire chess game?
An entire chess game may well have more creative choices in it. After all, full-length chess games are quite rarely repeated! (independently). There are a rather large number of variations.
As further evidence, consider the term "novelty" which is a single choice at a particular move, which has never been played before (is a new variation/line.) The term "a novelty" in chess is quite specific and also is evidence that even when you are still in the opening, Chess people consider move choices to be quite creative.
All this might seem to imply that I am disagreeing wiht you or others: I'M NOT. Chess games shoudl NOT be copyrighted.
But as a very highly technical point of law, they contain more creative choices or entropy than other creative works that are protected.
Please be more careful in your analysis.
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
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.
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.
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.
What's the difference between:
1. e4 e5
2. Qh5 Nc6
3. Bc4 Nf6??
4. Qxf7#
fmt: .string "Hello World!\n"
.balign 4
.global main
main:
stp x29, x30, [sp, -16]!
mov x29, sp
adrp x0, fmt
add x0, x0, :lo12:fmt
bl printf
ldp x29, x30, [sp], 16
ret
PS: There are also many ways to generate code that don't create a copywrite.
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 that there's anything wrong with that – look no further than the "smart contracts" fiasco to see the folly of trying to define rules in a "completely objective" framework.
PS: "copyright", not "copywrite".
Where creative choices are incredibly constrained (as with a chess game -- there really isn't that much entropy going into one), or my example with simple melodies, the application of copyright becomes interesting.
What's the difference between that and a chess game (which takes significantly more intellectual effort than a messageboard comment)