Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Official statement ? Here it is.

Author: elunsen

Date: 08:31:40 06/25/02

Go up one level in this thread


Honestly, I don't know what to think of it.
Powerbook 2002 contains more than 650,000 games
so it's impossible that the book we elaborated for
several years contains exactly as many games as
Powerbook 2000 since it would imply that
in the last 2 years more than 200,000 GM have been
played what would be statistically impossible.
Admittedly, I do not have Powerbook 2000, so I cannot
compare the file sizes nor the number of games,
but copyrighting file sizes or game quantities,
would be about be the same as copyrighting the pagination
of books or the composition of natural material.
All included game histories were or are publicly available
and therefore can not be copyrighted by commercial software
providers. Only annotations, comments or variations
implemented by chess authors to existent game
histories are subject to author's rights and could
theoretically be copyrighted by their authors. The
database and opening book do not contain any
annotations, comments, variations or other copyrightable
material and consequently no copyright to the provided
material can be claimed. However, there have been several
test verions of our book and  we can not exclude the
infinitesimal possibility that some of the files that were
transferred back and forth to Dr. Sokolov's server who
did part of the testing had unintentionally been renamed
from "PowerBook.ctg" to "Book.ctg" and, being accidentally
taken for the final version of our book, were uploaded to the
UiB FTP site, but such a concatenation of mistakes among
mathematicians would be most improbable. However, if this be
the case, it reflects a most deplorable concurrence of coincidential
circumstances but it would account for the fact that some
people complained about our book's relative playing strength what
in fact surprised me. Anyway, during the coming weeks we will
compile a new version of the opening book which in the near future
will be available from the world's largest chess archives :
http://www.uib.no/people/pfvaf/chesslib/
It is a most deplorable reality that commercially-minded people
use unfounded calumnies to try to eliminate freeware sites like ours
in order to provide the same material on a commercial basis and
squeeze some miserable money out of unaware chess fans.

E. Lunsen



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.