Where do people go for free sgfs of professional games? I regularly check out www.wbaduk.com but I'm guessing there are other places.

Big resources

free and uncommented:
http://igokisen.web.fc2.com/news.html

pay for and commented (with some free samples):
http://gogameworld.com/

eidogo.com has a large collection but no new games since September - does anyone know what happened?

The Go Topics website has always the newest games: http://igokisen.web.fc2.com/news.html

If you don't want to have to download the games and load them in your SGF viewer, you can also view them directly here: http://www.361points.com/kifu/list/

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Sorin - 361points.com

[edited] is also nice - or at least I thought it was before i read the rest of this thread

This was new to me. The very first two records I looked at were for Go Seigen and contained the following information for the event.

1978-04-17 Go vs Sonoda
Game to mark award of government honour to Hashimoto Utaro 9-dan

1989-01-17 Go vs Yoda
Exhibition game to commemorate the Japan-China Super Cup matches

This bears a remarkable 100% resemblance to the event records in the GoGoD database which I wrote. I have the sources for these games. The above words do not appear as such in the source, so I think we can rule out the possibility of someone else, other than Shakespeare's typewriting monkeys, coming up with exactly the same words.

Maybe sgfdatabase.com could explain this remarkable coincidence.

The links at the bottom suggest that breakfast may be involved with that site, so maybe he can tell more.

It is exceedingly common for breakfast to seek partnerships with any existing go sites that have an established unique page rank. I doubt very much whether he knows much at all about sgfdatabase.com.

Ah. Maybe I was too naive thinking it was legit. I don't know who is behind that website - I'll edit my link so they don't have more publicity until this issue is settled.

There is no big need to explain that. They most likely simply copied those short descriptions. That is nothing to be ashamed of, and surely not illegal or even morally questionable. Such small snippets are not even copyrightable, just like newspaper headlines.

You might assume that they simply imported the whole GoGoD data into their database. That could be a different issue, at least legally, in some countries. I think that the only ethical problem here is that they do not seem to cite their sources (or it is hidden).

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

It makes "more-than" sense for breakfast to seek partnerships with go sites that have page rank. For further information you should take a look at the bottom lines of his personal homepage at go4go.net or top361points...

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My blog about Go and Boardgames: Alejo's Tenuki

Which is the more likely assumption, that they took the time to copy (some of?) the game descriptions and paste them into the corresponding SGF files which they obtained from other sources, or they just copied all the GoGoD game files?

Occam's razor suggests the latter.

I believe that GoGoD broke 50000 games in 2007. This database has 52000, including a number of non-Asian amateur games that are probably not in GoGod. Additions are not that fast, but they're not trivial either.

Added clarification: I don't think this proves anything about them not ripping off GoGoD--it would presumably just mean they had used an old version or not imported the full database for whatever reason. It would be pretty easy to look at selected games from each new edition.

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Occupy Babel!

I have also done a little research on that database and found some very interesting handicap games, played by Kawai Tetsuyuki, with members of his club. The problem is that these games only appear in the GoGoD database; they have never been published in any book or magazine appearing in the West, so (Occam's razor, again) I have to assume that they were taken from the GoGoD database, without our permission. It would be very easy to prove me wrong, by showing a scan of the title page of the book where they were published, in Japan, which is where I bought it. If they do, I will apologise, but until they I believe that someone else is ripping off the work I do.

Best wishes.

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No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

Perhaps they bought a GoGoD CD?

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

And you think that gives them the right to put the games on their web site?

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Rather than speculate, why not ask them?
It is possible they do not know the origin of all games.

So by your logic it would be OK for a purchaser of Microsoft Office to post a copy of it on their website?

I'm not the rights holder so I'm not going to ask them. The intent of my prior post was merely to point out that the most likely explanation was wholesale copying of GoGoD games.

It also indicates that unless the Twitter account is an elaborate fabrication (something I find implausible) they did not import sgfs wholesale from GoGoD in one burst. That does not answer all questions raised here, of course.

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Occupy Babel!