The North American Chess Association (NACA), is proud to announce the acquisition of all intellectual property rights to ‘The Chess Organiser’s Handbook”.
The Chess Organiser’s Handbook was previously authored by Mr. Stewart Reuben, International Arbiter and International Organizer from the United Kingdom. The third edition for the book was published in 2005. Mr. Reuben is being retained as the technical advisor and editor of future editions. The handbook has been the reference point for many organisers and arbiters globally.
The focus of the handbook will be to assist organisers and arbiters in the design and execution of various types of chess related events, addressing a variety of operational aspects, including but not limited to: event financials, marketing, event conditions, and contracts. Additionally there will be a detailed documentation of similarities and
differences between the FIDE Laws of Chess and the Laws of Chess in the United States.
Future editions of The Chess Organiser’s Handbook will be made available at no cost through various online mediums including Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iPAD, and directly from the NACA website in PDF format.
Hmmm…this looks like a backdoor approach to making the USCF Rulebook available via electronic format. It will be interesting to see what McKay (Random House) does, if anything, about it.
Right now the way we are looking at doing it is listing the FIDE rule, under it the USCF rule if different, and under that any USCF rule for scholastic events if different. The format will most likely change when we start to play with it.
Does anyone believe that rules themselves are protected by copyright? If so can you show me some proof of this?
If not then it certainly seems that if you leave out the table of contents, the index, the TD tips and anything else that isn’t clearly a rule then where is the violation? It actually seems to me that something like this seems beneficial to the publisher because they might want to buy the book simply for all those other extras.
Game rules are not protected by copyright. Any individual explication of those rules, however, is. I can write a book called All the Rules of Chess and explain them to my heart’s content – as long as I don’t lift blocks of text from, say, the USCF’s Official Rules of Chess.
The trouble is, there can be only one official set of precisely worded rules, and somebody holds the copyright and the publishing rights on it. So it doesn’t matter what I choose to write; my book will never be the authority that Official Rules of Chess is.
So are you saying that the above is an individual explication of the rule and cannot be copied? Or is it the actual rule? Are you saying to be legit one would have to summarize the above when copying it? (Except for other fair use copying of it?)
It’s an explication of the rule, and yeah, if you were writing your own book, you’d have to either summarize it or quote it with cited attribution, and you couldn’t put together a whole book that consisted of nothing but quotations from the same source.
But as Sevan Muradian pointed out, none of this has much to do with his book. It’s just the thing keeping anyone else from publishing a complete book of official USCF chess rules. To get around the copyright law, the rules would have to be summarized and/or paraphrased to such an extent that the letter of them could no longer be relied upon.
Incidentally, the graphic design of a published game is also copyrightable. That’s how Hasbro can make a mint packaging the parlor games of yesteryear as $30 party games yet also win injunctions against programmers who write Facebook applications that look and act too much like Scrabble.
I see the concept that you are saying, but it seems that if you paraphase the rule it isn’t the rule anymore. I’m not a lawyer so I’m just basing my belief on the issue that Rules can’t be copyrighted.
I went to the U.S. Copyright Office web page. copyright.gov/title17/
and found the following
§ 102. Subject matter of copyright: In general …
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
It also seems to me in my unlawyer mind that the USCF is already violating the Rulebook copyright itself by publishing a derivative work with the rule changes and TD tips about them.
I think the real issue is that the powers that be simply don’t believe that having a version of the Official USCF rules online or in electronic format is an issue to worry about. The “we have an ancient contract” etc is just a convenient excuse.
This may work more ways than one. If you make a ruling based on a paraphrased rule, but there could be a difference in application between that and the exact wording of the rule itself, and your ruling is appealed, you could lose that appeal because you didn’t follow the rule, just a paraphrased version of it.
Exactly. That’s the rub when you try to publish the official rules of any sport or game organization: The application of the rules depends on their exact wording, and there usually is only one such wording. You can have dozens or hundreds of books on how to play chess, but you can only have one on how to play chess under sanctioned tournament conditions, because the minute you paraphrase or summarize, you risk introducing discrepancies. The USCF will even have had to get explicit legal permission from FIDE in order to include the FIDE “Laws of Chess” in its own official rulebook; without the ability to reproduce the FIDE rules verbatim, any attempt to include such a section would be worse than useless.
So if the rule paraphased isn’t the rule anymore then that rule itself must be a fact. And according to the Copyright Office
And realize we aren’t just talking about the rules of the game of chess but the rules of playing in USCF tournaments or USCF competive chess. So posting the factual rules should be competely legit. But then right beneath the Copyright Office quote above is the following.
A quick look shows that pages xx-xxii, xxvi-xxix, xxxiii, xxxvi-10, 16-18, 21, 25, 28 and 31-32 are not on-line. I stopped looking once I reached page 33 but a significant part of the rulebook is not available that way.
Ah, but it is a step in the right direction attitude wise for Random House. Further I have paperwork that shows USCF is the holder of the copyright. So, did USCF need to give permission for this sample to be placed on-line? I suspect not; however, ???
The problem with the USCF usage of the Rulebook on line doesn’t seem to be really about Copyright because the rulebook clearly says Copyright c 1975,1978,1987,1993,2003 by UNITED STATES CHESS FEDERATION
The problem is the contract that no one seems to have a copy of and the desire of someone in power at the USCF to make an issue of it in order to get the rules online.
