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.
I would imagine that the websites that give play-by-play info may have paid for the right to publish information about the game, or they may be able to just watch it on TV (or live) and update their info that way. As another commenter noted, the organizers could have set up the competition to forbid the audience from disseminating info, but they didn't for whatever reason.
No it was not. It says in the article: Organizers ... failed to persuade a federal judge to block rival website operators from broadcasting chess moves ...
The defendants also said that they would not simply be copying audiovisual content generated by World Chess, but displaying the moves on their own computerized chess board while adding commentary and analysis.
The ruling directly attacks the business model of the organizers and will thus reduce the chance of attracting sponsors in the future. Hence, it is not in the public interest.
Chess is a peculiar game in that the visual content of any broadcast ie players actually playing, is subordinate to the moves made. Nobody watches a chess game online for 5 hours for the fun of seeing the players think. That's like waiting for the paint to dry. Take away the advantage of broadcasting the moves with commentary and analysis and your advantage as a sponsor is gone. I would have thought the judge would have understood this and taken it into account.
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.
Scoring goals in a soccer match is something the players try to influence but it's ultimately outside of their control. I think publishing goals in soccer are more akin to publishing vague information like "Black lost his bishop on turn 4" but not the specific sequence of moves.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
Feist is a case where a phone book company stole the data in a phone book, and began reselling it. It deals with publication of facts, and is a situation where there's a reasonable public policy argument for incentivising the private company's work collection of phone number data. It's a commonly taught fundamental Copyright claim that is a great starting point for those interested in researching further.
> 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].
The Feist case was about the expense accrued in aggregating the information and the incentive issues that arise if those efforts are not protected.
The NBA case was about the division of rights between the competition organizer and those attempting to report on it. Specifically, are the reporters required to delay their reporting efforts when the only information being reported generated by the event is factual.
If I understand correctly, this ruling doesn't preclude the event organizers from banning all electronic communication devices from the premises. It just prevents them from pursuing any civil penalties from those that report on the event.
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.
Person A opens the stream on their PC.
Unknown to them, Person B watches that stream through the window of Person A’s home, and broadcasts the information.
The only possible crime Person B did was invading Person A’s privacy, but Person A does not sue them.
Person A acted entirely legal, so did Person B, and you still got all the facts out.
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.
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.
You can't publicly broadcast facts. Then say no one else has the right to rebroadcast those same facts.
There might be an issue of legality concerning the embargo in which case the limitation is warranted.
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/chess24-win-moscow-case-ann...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTCNuQ2mGfW6-SpHpaze_g (direct link to livestream)
If you're looking for live computer engine lines, Steinar Gunderson offers that here, with 38 cores running Stockfish:
As well as PGN files (live-updated):
it's hard to say if that's close to "perfect analysis", because we don't know what a perfect game will look like (chess is not a solved game). but compared to human level, one could say it's close to perfect.
There's no known tractable way to solve chess. There's something like 10^120 move orders [0], and no known way to find perfect play without brute-forcing (almost) all of them. Chess engines can't solve to to the end of a game to see which moves are certain to win; they can only explore to a very shallow depth, and evaluate the horizon nodes by very human-like [1] approximate heuristics.
It looks perfect from a human PoV (the best human players have no chance of winning); but there's still an unimaginably large gulf between chess engines and mathematically perfect chess.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
[1] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...
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...
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).
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.
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.
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....
You have a soccer match in which a lot of fans show up with cameras. Either like a Go-Pro or just their phones, or like Google Glasses.
From the many fan cams, you can reconstruct the state of the match. From the FIFA video games, or from image analysis, you have all the player likenesses.
So then someone could "watch" the game from any vantage point, using just the "facts" of the game, without doing an actual re-broadcast of the game.
What then?
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?
stats.com charges like $80k per season per sport or something like that for access to their live game data api.
world chess should take this all the way, airing the moves for free is undercutting their business model. seems like it shouldn't be legal considering chess is a sport.
