Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 11:25:47 05/01/02
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On May 01, 2002 at 09:08:16, Jeroen Noomen wrote: >On May 01, 2002 at 06:19:35, Mike S. wrote: > >Take the following exampe: I buy MS Office, use the very same look, buttons, >screens etc. to make a software package that is very much the same, tell the >world 'Yes, I used MS Office to make this beautiful new package'. You think this >is legal? Sorry if this offends you, but it's not the same kind of work. Creating a software package and creating a collection of chess moves you deem worthy aren't the same. Maybe the same amount of work or more went into making the opening book, but it's not anywhere close to being the same. I see trying to claim that copying your opening book would be illegal as closer to someone trying to copyright the phrase, "Once upon a time" (a line from a book opening book). If someone made a book of opening lines to books such as "Once upon a time", "In the beginning", "There once was a little [whatever]", they might be able to copyright that. But anyone choosing to use one of the lines from that book would be perfectly within their rights to do so. And in that situation there actually ARE copyright laws working in the situation. In your situation, there are no copyright laws in place (unless you have a copyright on your opening book that we aren't aware of), so someone taking some lines from your book is within anyone's rights. In addition to that, I imagine that most of what is in your opening book is probably "standard" stuff that you could find in say, Modern Chess Openings. I would guess there might also be some things that you have come up with on your own, but even if that is the case, as we have already clarified, it would be perfectly within the rights of a person to use a few of your original lines in their opening book, at which point they would probably have a book very similar to yours. Once again, I'd like to say that I'm not saying that you didn't work hard or that your work is poor quality or that it's ok for people to just up and copy the entire opening book byte for byte. I just don't see why this is such a huge ordeal. So a couple of people used your book without buying it? How about 100 people? I doubt 100 people have stolen your opening book and are using it in their chess programs. There aren't that many chess programs out there to begin with, and even if more than 2-3% of them were using illegal copies of your book, the number of people using it illegaly is still far less than the number of people with illegal copies of Fritz or the other top chess programs. Then if you compare the number of people using illegal copies of Fritz to the number of people using illegal copies of "popular" software, I think we will start to see how insignificant this whole thing really is. A few people might use your opening book illegaly, and there's nothing you can do about it. Not one thing. If you get a law passed, what will that do? If some organization that is running a chess tournament makes a rule against using books you did not create, is that going to stop anyone from using it and changing a few things or adding some lines and claiming it's their own? Of course not. There are people in this world who will do the "wrong" thing regardless of what laws or rules we have in place. If you'd like an example, I know of a person who was expelled from their school because they had gone hunting the weekend before and left a gun in their trunk. The story was verified that they had in fact been camping and that the gun didn't even belong to the student. They expelled her anyway. The reason was because they had a "rule" of zero tolerance. You messed up once, and you were out, and she couldn't attend a public school anywhere else in that state. As a side note it was 3 weeks before she was scheduled to graduate. So what did this law really accomplish? Nothing but expelling some innocent people. If they found a gun or any other weapon on someone or in their car, what does expelling them do to stop them from shooting up half the school? Absolutely nothing. I think if my plan was to murder innocent school children and risking suffering life in prison or the death penalty, I wouldn't be too concerned about being expelled from school. What's to stop that same person from coming back to the school the next week and killing people out of revenge? The point is, some people are going to break the rules regardless, and often there is nothing you can do to stop them. And as I said in another post in this thread, there are some things beyond your control, and getting upset about those things which you have no control over is pretty silly. Russell >I bet you would receive a 'threatening' letter by MS immediately. And >rightly so. > >Jeroen
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