There is a glaring inconsistency in this ruling when compared to the status quo for other sports.
In baseball, football the Olympics etc the sponsors hold the broadcast rights and do with it as they deem fit. Why is this same right denied to the organizers of the World Chess Championship?
I think your analogy is wrong. Many websites broadcast live "play-by-play" info on MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL games. These are typically done, for example, by showing a graphic of a strike zone and where pitches are located as they are pitched. However, the actual game audio and video is not broadcasted. I don't believe you need any sort of license to display this information (correct me here if I'm wrong).
As far as I can tell, that's what's going on here: websites want to broadcast the "play-by-play" of the chess game, but not the actual game footage. Now, the play-by-play for a chess game is more important than the play-by-play for a hockey game, so I can see why the organizers of the chess tournament aren't happy, but I think the correct decision was made here.
When I watch MLB games streamed from mlb.tv, there is a warning at the end that says you may not reproduce or transmit the game or descriptions thereof (or something like that). I don't remember the exact language, but I do remember being struck by the fact that it extended beyond the game itself.
I would imagine that the websites that give play-by-play info may have paid for the right to publish information about the game, or they may be able to just watch it on TV (or live) and update their info that way. As another commenter noted, the organizers could have set up the competition to forbid the audience from disseminating info, but they didn't for whatever reason.
You are correct, but there is also a distinction between the posturing of sports giants like the MLB and the NFL and what would actually hold up in court in a possible legal challenge. My media law professor seemed pretty sure that, in a vast majority of these cases, those "prohibitions" would not hold up.
I'd be curious to know why they wouldn't hold up—did your professor give a reason or mention any particular cases that led him/her to reach this conclusion?
In my experience (lawyer in Palo Alto for 7 years), parties can agree by contract to do or not do many many things. Even provisions that limit legal recourse, like the much-decried mandatory arbitration clauses [1] have held up all the way to the US Supreme Court. I would be very interested to know what legal basis there would be to invalidate a license agreement that says: you can have access to this content but only if you promise not to tell other people about it.
"parties can agree", but I turned on my TV after the legalese was broadcast. The average website or software shrinkwrap has a lot better contract formation than that.
That seems like a cop-out avoiding the issue. If you did see it, what's the argument for it to be unenforceable? Note that it should be unenforceable, but it's a hard case to make without a certain amount of "I know it when I see it".
And "there are no limits to the content of contracts people freely enter" is obviously an untenable position – we'd all agree that a provision giving me your kidneys, hidden somewhere deep in the ToS is unenforceable.
Yeah, interestingly they show it at the end (I'm sure there's a reason, but of course you could have turned it off before that pops up). It's probably also in the mlb.tv subscription agreement, which again doesn't make it necessarily enforceable, but if they also show it during the broadcast it makes it a bit more likely to be enforced than if it's just one of a thousand things in the clickwrap.
No it was not.
It says in the article:
Organizers ... failed to persuade a federal judge to block rival website operators from broadcasting chess moves ...
The defendants also said that they would not simply be copying audiovisual content generated by World Chess, but displaying the moves on their own computerized chess board while adding commentary and analysis.
The ruling directly attacks the business model of the organizers and will thus reduce the chance of attracting sponsors in the future. Hence, it is not in the public interest.
Chess is a peculiar game in that the visual content of any broadcast ie players actually playing, is subordinate to the moves made. Nobody watches a chess game online for 5 hours for the fun of seeing the players think. That's like waiting for the paint to dry. Take away the advantage of broadcasting the moves with commentary and analysis and your advantage as a sponsor is gone. I would have thought the judge would have understood this and taken it into account.
Yeah, a business model is more important than the non-copyrightable nature of facts. Good thing the judge understood the actual law, which is not concerned with business models.
> Yeah, a business model is more important than the non-copyrightable nature of facts.
I fail to see your point. The law should be applied with a dose of common sense. The organizers are not barring anyone from the "facts" as you put it just trying to get a lead in broadcasting. The law upholds the rights of organizers of other sports eg football and boxing based on their peculiarities and in case you are not aware is frequently biased in defense of their commercial rights (one only needs recall the absurdities surrounding the olympics).
For years, chess has suffered from crises caused by lack of sponsorship for events. If this ruling serves to deter future sponsors and leads to uncertainty or cancellation of matches (which has happened before) then what good is that?
Your argument can be summarized as that we should ignore what copyright law says because the consequence of the law is bad in this particular case for certain chess companies.
That's neither a sane or reasonable way to make legal judgments. Can you show a sound legal argument why the judge's ruling was wrong?
FYI, there used to be a 'hot news' doctrine that might have protected the chess moves (and the FIDE made this their argument), but it's been largely superseded or overturned [1].
The copyright applies to the recording not the abstract information related to game state. This is similar to a radio broadcasting at a baseball game simultaneously with live video owned by separate company. Courts shouldn't expand rights to protect poorly thought out business models.
Take a sport like snooker and replace the footage with animated board which perfectly represent how the match is played. Would it be interesting enough to compete with the actually broadcast with video of the players and commentators?
Plenty of third-party sites which don't hold any license from MLB, for example, will tell you "Currently 3-1, runner on 2nd, top of 8th inning, Smith, B. batting vs. Doe, J. pitching, count 1-2, last pitch 90mph called for strike on lower inside corner". And they'll update it with each pitch and each play.
The facts of the game are not copyrighted and not copyrightable, which is why sites can do this. Similarly, the moves of a chess game are facts which are not copyrighted and not copyrightable, which is why sites can tell you in real time who's playing and what moves have been made.
Because it's not the broadcast. This is comparable to newspapers not being allowed to report on goals in a soccer match or have any kind of live coverage (but still not showing the broadcast).
Except the moves in a chess game are deliberately chosen in a process involving nothing but intellect and creativity.
Scoring goals in a soccer match is something the players try to influence but it's ultimately outside of their control. I think publishing goals in soccer are more akin to publishing vague information like "Black lost his bishop on turn 4" but not the specific sequence of moves.
They certainly claim to. The NFL loudly proclaims that "Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited."
I have a feeling that if they ever tried to prosecute the accounts part of warning they would lose miserable. Imagine them trying to argue that a person describing a game they'd seen to a friend required their consent. Maybe it would fly, IANAL, but that seems insane to me.
No idea why you are being downvoted. Regardless of whether it's actually enforceable, this threat is definitely aired during every NFL game. MLB too: "This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated without express written consent."
Sorry, I turned on my TV 1 minute after that was displayed.
This issue is called "contract formation", and any HN reader who's shipped licensed software or had a website with terms of service should be aware that showing something that a user may or may not have seen is the worst possible way to try to form a contract. That's why creating an account on almost all websites has a checkbox that the user has to check, with text that you're agreeing to certain terms.
I'd prefer to make a more forceful case that there are limits to contracts, and not to rely on the technicality of people saw the note, or if "a meeting of minds" actually happened.
What if the note is also in the actual contract that has my signature? Is the content of such contracts limited in any way?
I mean – it must be. I can easily get any number of people to sign contracts that include a right for me to their firstborn child.
Whatever legal doctrine courts would use to strike down such a provision should also apply to, for example, people waving their right to sue, to freely discuss the content of broadcasts, to rate the product/service being purchased etc.
They have a right to the artifacts of their production - their specific footage of the event. They don't have a right to all possible descriptions of those events. That would be absurd - someone could sing "old MacDonald" and have it claimed that it is a codified description of the events of a game. But of course, they only have the rights to their description of the game.
I'm not sure I'd agree, the moves of a Chess game aren't really analogous to a broadcast. They're a lot more like a box score a play by play summary of a sport which I think are both legal to share. A broadcast of a chess game would be the analog of the broadcast of a sporting event. Unfortunately people aren't really that interested in Chess broadcasts, they'd rather just see the moves.
Broadcasters have rights to the content they create surrounding an event and by contractual agreement share those with relevant league in return for access to their facilities. Not to the factual events themselves. Nothing prevents an uncontracted source from reporting on the score at any time.
