The Bulgarian Chess Federation banned ChessBase, the world’s biggest online chess portal, from broadcasting a match live, citing copyright infringement.
This raises fascinating issues.
Generally, sports broadcasting has been copyright protected – see, for example, Israeli Supreme Court’s Tele-Event decision. Usually, some creativity on the part of the cameraman or editor is used as justification for awarding protection.
In this instance, ChessBase was steaming the moves using a text format notation and thus did not have any creative input whatsoever. If the moves themselves are considered copyright, then the rights are presumably property of the player and not the federation hostig a championship.
One assumes that noone is serious advocating that a move first played by someone cannot be played by another player until the creator has been dead for seventy years?
It does seem unlikely that a braodcaster requires the federation’s permission. On the other hand, why shouldn’t a hosting organization be able to maintain at least short term braodcasting rights of the moves?
”They issued a cease and desist, and we complied,” stated ChessBase co-founder Frederic Friedel. “It is too expensive, time-wise, to get involved in protracted lawsuits with Bulgarians, and there is little to gain, monetarily, from a victory.” Is this simply a case of copyright abuse?
