I expect the usual malevolence towards GoGoD from Donald Duck, but since he has twisted this thread let me unravel it a little bit.

GoGoD follows the usual western view that individual go game records are not copyrightable. This is legally untested but there are analogies with legal cases for western chess. A compilation and also any comments within the file are, however, copyrightable.

For form's sake we do assert any copyright accruing to us. However, in practice we do not rely on the law. We have instead done two things. One is that we have spoken (in person) to officials within the various professional organisations to explain what we are doing. In their ideal world they would like to retain copyright but accept that the west has a different view and also that we are essentially promoting go. What they do insist on though is that a sponsor's first publication rights are respected. We therefore respect the sponsors (giving prominent mention to them also in the Encyclopaedia), we provide the organisations with free copies of all our CD updates so they know what we are doing, we do not sell to their own audiences in their own countries, and we undertake to stop should they ever ask us to.

The other thing we do is to rely on the integrity of the go community. We have therefore always kept the database as a plain text file, unencrypted. Although at times our faith in the community has been sorely tested, we do find that nearly all members do show goodwill and understanding. There are irritating exceptions even here, including one member who meticulously does the extra work of deleting GoGoD's name as the transcriber of games before posting them here and giving the impression he has done the real work himself. We are not seeking to stop the games being discussed here - in fact we welcome that - but being denied credit for the work done is a little niggling, even at our age.

How much work is done? We can't pretend that we have personally input every move of every single game into the GoGoD database, although we have added always added value by putting information into English and checking sources, and so adding or amending moves and data. But we (and predominantly T Mark) have entered the majority.

As a test this morning, I entered an entire new game this morning myself - given below. I'm not as fast as T Mark at the best of times and I've been quite rusty lately, but this game took me exactly 50 minutes. Quack, quack! It was quite a short game, but had certain difficulties including poor printing, two move 13s, no move 107, move 93 misprinted, no indication of how many moves were shown, Chinese numbering, a single diagram, and moves by an amateur - in general amateur games are harder to input because they don't play at the points you learn to expect when you've input lots of pro games.

Some of the time was taken by me reading a couple of pages of Japanese text to find out why and where the game was played and who the amateur was. Some of the information I used to add a bit of value to the sgf record. Other titbits go into my head and may get fed into the western community via my books or even items I post on L19. For example I may one day use the fact that Segoe (a world no. 1!) was prepared to play postal go with a country doctor, from way before this game (he started in 1919) at a time when most of his attention was taken up with the politics that led to the founding of the Nihon Ki-in. He doesn't say - but then Segoe was never one to complain - but presumably he only stopped the postal games because the Great Kanto Earthquake happened on 1 September 1923 and wiped out much of Tokyo. I note this information because the more I learn about this man the more I tend to feel he may be the greatest all-round personage in go history.

We know that there are other people out there who treasure Segoe's games. It will be interesting to see how this record spreads around the globe, with or without GoGoD's name attached. I am totally certain that very few people will have access to the source (a 1924 Kido, which costs slightly more than a SmartGo book - and all GoGoD income goes on building up such source libraries BTW) and would bother to transcribe such a game.

Where I have an issue with compilation copyrights is where, like the article I linked, they are copyrights merely of a short list of material already in the public sphere. I have trouble considering such as worthy of protection for something as trivial as the ordering of not even twenty No. 1 singles. Whereas with GoGoD we're not just getting a list of sgfs already out there but many games which have never been in sgf form and as accessible to the Western audience. I find it very difficult to not consider such worth of protection. Whether an individual sgf should be copyrighted, eh that's rather tricky. I think the current compromise position in chess of commented games are but uncommented games is a good one, mainly because it means individuals can produce free commented games without worrying about paying royalties or getting a cease and desist letter because someone is publishing a book about those games soon or whatever (the latter being something of a problem with open source and free "spiritual successors" to old video games, they are often ignored until some popularity is gained and then a cease and desist letter comes in as someone makes a commercial remake).

Ok, lets try two a little more focused questions.

But first a disclaimer:
I am not thinking of anything silly here, its really just a morbid curiosity on my part.

The below questions are something I feel we have been skirting by in the past, but I personally always felt the answers not very satisfactory.

1. Can I legally take an existing games database (like GoGoD), rearrange it, and then sell it? If not, why not? Is it a matter of manually entering data? If so, why is it OK to copy/paste one game but the whole collection I would have to manually enter? And why does it matter how exactly the original collection was assembled/entered?
2. Can I legally take an existing games database (like GoGoD), add to it a whole bunch of 'other' games, possibly rearrange it a little, and then sell it? If not, why not?

I know the moral answers to these questions (just don't do it), and have no problem with those. I am fishing here for a more legal viewpoint. If possible, in plain words.

And an unrelated bonus question:

• What happened to gobase.org? I haven't been there for a few years, now I go and see its stale. I am pretty sure its not my cache that is that old, but I have not heard any news about the site, so it makes me wonder. What gives?

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

My layman's 2c from what I've read on Irish copyright law over the years.

Irish, and as far as I know, European copyright law on databases (a term that covers everything from GoGoD to TV listings potentially) makes a distinction between an original database, e.g. GoGoD with it's "never before in sgf form" game records, and any derivative database that is a copy of that data. The former have the substansive rights, the latter have none if what they have done is merely copied from GoGoD in this case and made some minor changes. This distinction hasn't been tested in Irish court though as far as I can make out. So where exactly the line is drawn and just how original your rearrangement of someone else's database has to be, has yet to be discovered.

This is a murky enough question here that you'd have to bring in a specialist legal professional to answer it. The Spotify case in the US will be interesting but won't have any bearing on cases here.

A game or two is fine since the copyright holders of GoGoD only have copyright over the arrangement (and I believe selection, though this may vary from country to country) not any of the games themselves. Where the line is drawn here is something I have no idea about, e.g. can I cut and paste every game by Lee Changho and put it up as a zip for people to download? I have no idea. Copyright law in this area is strange because it's so difficult to define originality for an arrangement of other people's "work."

I'm no lawyer either, but if the selection is 'everything we can possibly find' instead of a subset of everything available, I'm not sure it would qualify, unless you assume that only one person can have the copyright on that selection of everything. On the other hand, if you have a set of, say, 50 games involving semeai, then by choosing that subset, you've created a meaningful selection, and someone else could, if they wanted to illustrate the same principle, choose a different set of 50 or however many games.

Another thorny question would be how many of those games could overlap before you're violating copyright on a selection, but I'll leave that one for another day.

Yes, and I suppose I should expect the usual name calling. Thanks for untwisting that which was "twisted"!

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be immersed

Some quick googling found this:

http://jiplp.oxfordjournals.org/content ... 3.abstract

These authors argue that chess games can't be copyrighted, taking the position that a game isn't "created" by the players, but rather "discovered", analogous to discovering mathematical facts. See also this discussion:

http://www.chessvibes.com/columns/copyr ... -the-wall/