| > 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? |
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.