How about hockey’s Savardian spin-o-rama? The answer isn’t as easy as you might think
March 15, 2009
STAFF REPORTER
To the uninitiated, the chess universe might be expected to mirror the game itself: slow, quiet and subsequently tedious, with a great many terms, names and manoeuvres that are hard to understand and even harder to pronounce.
Hockey Night in
Bond made the trek from his home in
In
Given the intense scrutiny and suspicion that seems to attend the highest levels of the game, it should come as no surprise that the drama extended beyond the palace walls. It began when the Bulgarian Chess Federation, citing copyright infringement, barred ChessBase, the world’s biggest online chess portal, from broadcasting the match live, move by move, in a text format as it had been doing without the federation’s permission.
ChessBase stopped, as ordered. “They issued a cease and desist, and we complied,” ChessBase co-founder Frederic Friedel wrote in an email to Bond. “It is too expensive, time-wise, to get involved in protracted lawsuits with Bulgarians, and there is little to gain, monetarily, from a victory.”
What didn’t stop was the resurrection of an age-old question that stretches beyond the relatively particular chess realm and into the broader arena of sporting events and intellectual property rights in an increasingly instantaneous media world. Can a game, a match, an idea, or even a move be copyrighted if it is done in public?
Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the
“Copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, it protects the expression of those ideas,” Geist states, cautioning that his familiarity with Bulgarian intellectual property law isn’t flawless.
Take the Leafs: “The way (Mikhail) Grabovski passes the puck isn’t subject to copyright; the CBC’s broadcast of it would be.”
Notwithstanding Grabovski’s reluctance to pass at all, using a chess move you saw online isn’t copyright infringement any more than attempting a Savardian spin-o-rama – the balletic move of former Montreal Canadiens great Serge Savard (though it has also been attributed to Chicago Blackhawks legend Denis Savard) – or an air-walking Michael Jordanesque lay-in, however embarrassingly unsuccessful you might be.
And while neither Kamsky nor Topalov’s moves could be protected, the rights to their being broadcast certainly could.
In the much larger arena of NFL football, the same issue has recently come to bear over the surfeit of bloggers gaining accreditation as official members of the media covering the games.
Last season, most were barred from live blogging at the stadiums themselves on the grounds that their presence infringed on the official, live-broadcast-rights owners (though, oddly, sitting on the couch at home and doing the same thing would constitute no such infringement).
That being the case, ChessBase was off base. But the broader assertion that the moves themselves could become the exclusive intellectual property of their creators has nothing to do with the Internet era. Bond recalls such debates having been on the chess agenda “for a couple of decades, at least.”
Susan Polgar, a former women’s world chess champion and tireless advocate of the game, says that the reasonable request of the Bulgarian Federation has ended up being conflated with the copyright issue.
“I wouldn’t mind getting paid every time my moves are used,” she laughs. “But I have a hard time envisioning how it would be enforced.”
Here is the full article.
Susan is right. It’s impossible to enforce it.
More importantly: how can you prove that your idea is not based on an older idea. You can’t, and this is why copyrighting ideas – including music in my opinion – is completely stupid. In music and chess it is very difficult to find something original, because most things have been tried and played before.
Once again Susan has brought attention to important chess news. I will continue to follow this topic and many others raised by this tremendous individual.