Welcome! This site is where I provide chess fans and enthusiasts with updates on my activities & interests as well as important chess news from around the world. It is also a site where everyone can productively discuss or ask questions about various chess issues! Your contributions and comments are welcome!
PLEASE KEEP IT CIVIL & RESPECT OTHERS!
There will be chess tips or fun puzzle everyday. Enjoy!
As I clearly stated above, my goal for this blog is to bring you CHESS NEWS from across the United States and around the world AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. I will also post any topic which I find interesting. It is like an updated online daily chess newspaper with many extras.
If you would like to contribute to the contents of this blog with news, pictures, stories and announcements from your areas, please feel free to send it to me.
It is also a forum which friends and colleagues from around the world can peacefully discuss and debate various issues. All negative and false posts as well as personal attacks will be deleted, especially if they come from anonymous posters. This blog will not become rec.games or the current USCF forum (USCF issues section).
You are more than welcome to disagree with me or other posters. However, do it in a polite, respectful and professional manner. All obnoxious posts or posts with profanity will also be deleted.
I am working hard to raise the level of respectability and professionalism in chess. It will start here! Thank you for your support and understanding.
I like your rules. Don’t worry about a few bad apples. They’ll go away eventually.
“Excel through chess” –
Why (TM)?
Susan is the best thing for chess in America since 1972.
— WIN WITH GRACE, LOSE WITH DIGNITY!(TM) — 2006 Susan Polgar©
No offense, but how can you trademark a phrase that Joe Paterno, head football coach at Penn State University has been using publicly since long before Susan was even born? In fact, a quick Google will show dozens of organizations that use this phrase as a motto…all founded long before Susan’s organization. It’s a good phrase, but I’m pretty sure you can’t trademark it.
I’m sure it’s perfectly legal.
I guess you could register it as a trademark (until Ms Polgar did)
if you wanted to, and if your conscience had permitted it.
I can understand why an eminent proponent of chess would use such a phrase, but I can see no benefit to the chess community arising from the restriction of such wonderfully positive words. Surely these things should be said as much as possible, shouldn’t they? I would never be able to bring myself to take such a thing as industrial property, however much it would benefit me personally.
Sincerely,
John Doe
Susan doesn’t make money from it. It’s for non-profit to teach kids.
Bravo Susan! It’s by time someone is taking charge and end the jokes at the uscf.
If she doesn’t make money then why is it a registered trademark? If you will defend this then please explain why it is a trademark, as I might very well have misunderstood the situation.
Ok, a little “legalize” 101 from the US Trademark and Patent Office:
“A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.”
“Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.”
So based on this, “WIN WITH GRACE, LOSE WITH DIGNITY!” can not be trademarked because it does not identify a unique source of a good or service. Trademark protection is designed to prevent confusion over products. However, “Susan Polgar” can be trademarked in such a way.
Such a phrase can also not be copyrighted because it is not a sufficiently “original work of authorship” to achieve such protection. NBA coach Pat Ryley tried to copyright the phrase “Three-peat,” but couldn’t under the same grounds even though he may have been the first to use it. The previous blogger pretty much proved that Susan was not the originator of the phrase. That is why simple phrases can not be copyrighted.
This ends this addition of knowing the law.
This blog is an oasis in the internet.
I think you should drop the trademarks, too. Apart from the legal issues cited above, what’s the point?
If I gave a lecture at a local school and I encouraged the kids to “win with grace, loose with dignity” would you sue?
If not, what’s the point.
I recall that many years ago Victors Pupols once insisted that all of the chessplayer’s moves were copywrited. Accordingly, anybody who played him a game and wanted to publish it had to pay him a fee first. So somebody ran a hilareous article in Northwest Chess Magazine giving only his own moves and inviting the readers to guess Pupols’. One of those tempest in a teapot stories.
BTW trademark issues in the business news has gotten kind of ridiculous. Radio Shack trademarked the single word “Shack”.
Then it started suing all the companies that had “Shack” in their title. If you wanted to start a “Chess Shack” they’d sue you. I don’t know what happenned to all of those suits.
— Win With Susan!
— Polgar’s Quest, Sloan’s Folly!
— Susan Sinks Sloan with Truth, Justice, and Fair-play!
— Susan Sleeps! (once every other year)
— The Adventures of an Insomniac by Susan
Susan,
Since the subject is this blog:
I feel uncomfortable to bring this up, since you do so much for chess in general, and for this blog, and it may appear demanding and ungrateful to ask for even more, BUT………you regularly put up chess problems, questions, puzzles, etc. We happily try to solve them, post our version of the solutions, but none of these are ever confirmed one way or another.
Would it be too much to ask, that a few days later (or whenever you have the time) would post a short message within the given chess problem which reveals the answer to the question?
Because this way, without the real answer the question remains forever a “maybe”. Lesses chess talents (such as myself) can’t really learn from these chess problems, unless there is a “for sure” solution posted at one point.
Gabor
A previous poster said that Pat Riley wasn’t able to copyright 3-peat. Perhaps thats true. However, he was able to trademark it and if you want to use the phrase on any commercial product, you must pay his company royalties… http://www.blinkbits.com/en_wikifeeds/3-peat
A trademark or service mark is a perfectly valid way to help a business or service protect itself from “knock-offs” that try to leverage the success of the company by confusing the buying public.
@gabor – just an advice – give up your BELIEVE in chess authorities – it is very important for advancement in chess to be selfconfident enough to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. read carefully through the solutions given by yourself and other bloggers – and pick the correct one (as Ms. Susan Polgar pointed out elsewhere – it is a great thing, that the solution of a given puzzle is finally always found by someone) – you need only time, to pick it out … ^^
sincerly, yours Vohaul
I agree with Gabor. Yes, self confidence is fine. Many is the time in college I turned in my solution to a math problem confident it was correct only to find from the teacher that it was wrong. I also remember Business Management classes where the entire class agreed on an answer to a problem only to be informed by the professor that it was wrong.
Without the teacher informing the class of the correct solution, we would never have known.
to know the truth is a completly different thing, than to work the truth out by yourself – and to be confirmed by a “teacher” on the solution of a logical puzzle is like surrendering to logic itself, isn’t it?
i for myself am not in need of an authority on chess puzzles – BUT – i admit:
these “well done” or “complete cramp” comments, given by Ms. Susan Polgar, still some months ago (i am with this blog at leaqst for a while …), have been very motivating, and i presume, they still would be…
sincerly
Mr. Sloan publishes pornography. I notice that he didn’t even TRY to deny the other charges that detailed how he tried to mislead the voters.
With his record of deception, will anybody believe ANYTHING he says? Unfortuanately, YES! If we let him repeat his “facts” often enough and loudly enough, people will start to believe him. This is called the “big lie” technique and unfortunately, IT WORKS.
We have to stop this political method. Silence won’t work. Treating him as a respected opponent and debating the merits of the issues won’t work, either. A large portion of the voters will believe whatever lies they hear most recently and vote accordingly, and treating Mr. Sloan with respect will just legitmize him in many people’s eyes.
It’s time to tell the truth about Mr. Sam Sloan, and tell it to EVERYBODY that might consider voting. He got elected to office by employing the “big lie” technique. His made outrageous charges against practically everybody else in USCF politics and convinced some people to vote for him. Trouble is these charges are simply not true. His supposed “qualifications” are ALSO simply not true:
– He’s NOT an EXPERT, He never was a MASTER.
– He publishes pornography that has been made attractive to CHILDREN.
– He claimed to not have a criminal record when in fact he had been convicted of felonies and held in jail on numerous occasions.
– His “successful” company (where is it now, Mr. Sloan?) was sued by the SEC.
– His claimed expertise in mathematics doesn’t extend to an understanding of basic accounting or simple statistics.
– He claimed to have received NO MONEY from the USCF, then later admitted that wasn’t true. (he STILL hasn’t admitted HOW MUCH!).
– He tried to claim money from the USCF that he wasn’t entitled to receive.
Most importantly, he can’t seem to stop spreading false, malicious attacks against every volunteer, employee, and contractor at the USCF that gets in his way. The ONLY reason the USCF hasn’t already been sued for Mr. Sloan’s statements is apparantly that the people being attacked care more about the USCF than Sam Sloan does. He damages the reputation of the USCF as a whole with practically every statement he makes.
Even the forum rules and censures from the EB will not make Mr. Sloan adhere to any reasonable standard of behavior. When it comes to the standards corporate officers are expected to follow, he just doesn’t get it.