[njharman]

You can copyright a particular arrangement of facts (or other non-copyright protected content) where that arrangement required creative thought (even if "arrangement" is just layout as simple as page numbers/breaks).

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.

[mattkrause]

No, you can't copy facts, period.

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.

[andromeduck]

So I could still go to a concert and publish the notes, pitches and timings of the sounds I heard because those are just facts not fixed to a medium like the chess moves here?

[icebraining]

No, because there's a law specifically about live musical performances: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap11.html

[waqf]

That law is about fixing the sounds themselves, which is specifically what andromeduck is proposing not to do.

It's conceivable that andromeduck's distinction won't stand up in law, but you haven't addressed it.

[icebraining]

Ah, right, fair enough.

[Confusion]

It seems you would be allowed to do that, but good luck with doing that in real time. First recording it and transcribing it in that way afterwards is not allowed.

[andromeduck]

You could probably do it for stuff like country reasonably easily with some kind of steno setup.

[njharman]

> You can copyright facts that have been 'fixed in a tangible medium of expression' as long as there's some minimal element of creativity.

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?

[mattkrause]

Are you always this hostile, or just to random people whom you have never met?

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.

[dogma1138]

In the US, other copyright laws do allow you to copy right a database or any other compiled work, as long as there was work that was conducted in order to create 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.

[jellicle]

> as long as there was work

Not work. Creativity. Big difference.

[njharman]

Do not think of laypersons idea of what creativity means. Legal definition of creativity is so broad there is very little difference. If human did it and it wasn't strictly a mechanical process (like copying), if any decision / choice was made that is "creativity".

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)