[logicallee]

I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. (you accidentally wrote "can" for "can't" at the end though, maybe you have time to correct it.)

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.

[greglindahl]

Are you a copyright lawyer? I'm thinking not, because cases like Feist v. Rural Telephone make it pretty clear what "facts" mean in the context of things you can copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

[slavik81]

It's definitely not clear to me that playing chess is an uncreative task like compiling phone numbers. Though, perhaps I don't know enough about chess. This seems like an interesting case to me.

[greglindahl]

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.

[slavik81]

Sure, but if choosing your moves is a creative task, then why wouldn't the moves be jointly copyrighted by the two players?

What's the difference between:

    1. e4 e5
    2. Qh5 Nc6
    3. Bc4 Nf6??
    4. Qxf7# 

and:

    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 

if both are the result of a creative process?

[Retric]

Events that happens are facts, creative representation of facts is copywritable but not mechanical translations. Thus you can't get a copywrite on the S&P's closing value, but you can on a story about it. Further, a program has multiple possible representations, you can copywrite the code in one of them, but not gain a separate one for the compiled code.

PS: There are also many ways to generate code that don't create a copywrite.

[matt4077]

You're talking past each other. I think everyone agrees with the decision, but it is indeed a gray area. The S&P closing value isn't comparable because it's the product of a stochastic process.

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".

[logicallee]

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 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...

[Retric]

Chess is far more constrained than that. Pawns generally have 0 or 1 move with the maximum possible of 3 moves followed by piece selection which is knight or queen as bishops and rooks have the subset of a queens moves. There are a maximum of 8 pawns. Thus (8 * 3 * 2) = 48

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.

[logicallee]

I appreciate your analysis - however you need to compare it not with the length of a Tweet but rather with the entropy in a melody: whereas there are typically "less than 50 legal choices" and an average game is "40 moves", a melody that has been held to be protected by copyright has fewer than 50 legal choices for each note, and requires fewer than 40 notes (by far) to be protected by copyright.

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.

[EdHominem]

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.

[logicallee]

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.

[kzrdude]

Filming a football field is also uncreative, isn't it?

[greglindahl]

That's a well-settled issue. Are you really claiming that writing down the positions of chess pieces is similar to operating a video camera looking at 3D objects?

On the other hand, you might want to check out Corel v. Bridgeman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....

[epmatsw]

From a position of total legal ignorance, I don't see a meaningful distinction. In both scenarios, you're recording an account of someone else's performance with enough fidelity for someone to know what's happening in the game. In the linked case, the issue seemed to be the the recorded content had no copyright, so I don't get why that's relevant? Very interested in a more detailed answer though :)

[primitivesuave]

Why was this downvoted? I found it to be a pretty interesting perspective, although I do think the equation of letters in a sentence to moves in a chess game is pretty weak. Moves made in a chess game are events that factually happened in the past - copyrighting them would be akin to copyrighting a certain historical event, such that only a copyright holder is given privilege to state information about it. Letters, words, and sentences are in a creative space of expression that has its own rules and regulations.

[umanwizard]

It's a historical fact that "primitivesuave" wrote down the sequence of letters "Why was this downvoted? I found it to be a pretty interesting perspective...", but if I published it, I'd still be violating your copyright.

What's the difference between that and a chess game (which takes significantly more intellectual effort than a messageboard comment)

[Scarblac]

The difference is that they are playing a sports match, not writing a comment. The current score/position of the match is just a fact, not an artistic creation.

[logicallee]

downvotes are probably because I could have taken on a legal perspective (but didn't), and I didn't talk about how much creativity goes into producing those facts. I want to be clear that I am fully behind the judge's choice: but he made it for pragmatic reasons, not because he couldn't have chosen for games to be copyrighted if he really wanted to. They could have been if he really wanted them to be, in the same way that simple melodies have been held to be copyrighted.

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.