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Subject: Re: Opening Book Copyrights

Author: Peter Berger

Date: 15:24:48 11/18/05

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On November 18, 2005 at 14:36:21, David H. McClain wrote:

>On November 18, 2005 at 12:17:06, Peter Berger wrote:
>
>>---
>>
>>Another twist: you manually put zillions of lines from ECO (or any other opening
>>book) into a PGN file and create an opening book from it - copyrights?
>>
>>Does this change when you do just that, but add lots of lines of own analysis or
>>does the answer stay the same?
>>
>>--
>>
>>I am actually very sceptical about the copyrights regarding most opening books
>>distributed anywhere, but I am not very knowledgeable about legal issues.
>>
>>Peter
>
>Peter,
>
>This would be taking public information (facts) and putting them into your own
>words (lines).  You present the facts as you interpret them in your own
>particular style.  It's your work.  DHM

I'd be interested in the legal situation. It is interesting for me, but it
probably takes an expert on these issues. To some extent I can see that it
doesn't seem to be much of an issue in real life as human opening books ( both
the internal ones of players and those published as new sources) suffer from the
very same problem. In "real" books, usually sources are given ( though not
always) , so it might be more like a scientific work.

I remember I checked one past Fritz opening book and it contained the complete
NCO ( conclusion from a still very limitted sample) amongst other lines.

There is some creative work involved either way( btw, in the simple (
simplified) examples I gave myself not really much IMHO), by selection of
sources and additional analysis and verification ( discarding and adding lines)
, but opening books clearly depend heavily on work done by others.

For Crafty and the last two WCCCs I think IM Larry Kaufman should be called a
Crafty team member when it is about book, as I more or less adapted the basic
design of an opening repertoire published by him, including quite a lot of
independent analysis done by him. If the opening book were treated just like an
engine it would be called a clone I assume :) . It is no issue as it wasn't
published, but  I would feel strange about calling myself the author.

The 2006 book will be different and most probably stand on the shoulders of a
wider variety of sources and more personal choices , but again I wouldn't feel
comfortable about publishing due to copyright issues .

Peter




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