Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 20:39:45 04/30/02
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Chess opening moves, for the most part, are not anywhere close to being "intellectual property", and the sharing of them is thus not a problem for the large portion of opening moves. If there are some original lines that you worked out that no one else in the history of chess publication has published that are present within your opening books, then congratulations, you have a small part of an opening book that you may claim intellectual property...maybe. Even if you did come up with something like this entirely on your own that no one else had ever come up with before, I still think it's quite unclear whether it's intellectual property. If that were the case chess would become illegal to play within seconds. You would play 1. e4 and...OOPS! Someone has already played that and so it's not allowed for you to play. Personally I think this is very silly. It's a game. If you created your opening books for financial gain, then you shouldn't get all up in arms when people start getting their hands on it. If you created them for people to use, then you shouldn't get all bent out of shape either. If you don't derive enough joy from doing it to the point where you are going to get all upset about people "stealing" what is mostly well known data, then perhaps you didn't do it for the right reasons to begin with. No organization making a rule is going to stop anyone from using a database of opening chess moves. I think this would be like someone creating a big list of prime numbers and selling them and getting upset when someone else gives them away for free. Sure, you put in the original work to create it, but I hardly think chess moves are in any way intellectual property. If that were the case, no one would be allowed to learn from others chess games. You wouldn't be able to see Kasparov's latest game and see his new line and use it without his permission, which is of course, absurd. Russell
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