[Hanoi5]

You guys in the first world are always worried about copyright infringements and stuff. I understand the reason for this for I have seen normal people being sued by big companies in the news (and losing). However it seems weird to me to think about copyright issues in bridge, or isn't it?

I mean, would the Bridge World sue somebody for using a problem/hand/idea they published in one of their magazines? How can Eddie Kantar know somebody's using one (or more) of his problems in their classes? Would Meckwell sue a pair for playing a convention/treatment they copied from their CC found in the internet (in ecats or the wbf site, for example)?

Information, or data in general, has so much power in the present time and yet it's so easy to exchange with the use of technology. I used to think that Facebook and Twitter could become great tools for teaching and training in bridge but I have somehow dismissed the former as it is more a hive of gossip than anything else. I'm giving Twitter a chance so I created an account and started sending out problems; I don't have many followers and those I have don't seem very interested in tweetting back answers but before I make it public (or more public) I'd like to know what are the rights of such published materials and whether I can use them with no fear of being a criminal.

[Zelandakh]

Unless local laws state differently you should be able to use such information when not making money from the material. It is also ethical to give the source and you should not use large swathes of a book of problems. If you stay within 10% you should generally be ok. The class example is different though - you cannot make money from someone else's material without authorisation. How you might get caught is quite another matter. Of course you can just change 5 or 6 small cards in the problem too.

The idea of a pair suing for unauthorised use of their convention is farcical. Where might that end? "Sorry, you cannot play the cards in this order because it represents a squeeze type that I discovered." One of the hallmarks of sports and games is that all competitors must be allowed to compete on equal grounds. Not being allowed to play something that another pair is allowed to play is very much against this ethos.

[babalu1997]

Hanoi5, on 2010-November-19, 04:55, said:

You guys in the first world are always worried about copyright infringements and stuff. I understand the reason for this for I have seen normal people being sued by big companies in the news (and losing). However it seems weird to me to think about copyright issues in bridge, or isn't it?

I mean, would the Bridge World sue somebody for using a problem/hand/idea they published in one of their magazines? How can Eddie Kantar know somebody's using one (or more) of his problems in their classes? Would Meckwell sue a pair for playing a convention/treatment they copied from their CC found in the internet (in ecats or the wbf site, for example)?

Information, or data in general, has so much power in the present time and yet it's so easy to exchange with the use of technology. I used to think that Facebook and Twitter could become great tools for teaching and training in bridge but I have somehow dismissed the former as it is more a hive of gossip than anything else. I'm giving Twitter a chance so I created an account and started sending out problems; I don't have many followers and those I have don't seem very interested in tweetting back answers but before I make it public (or more public) I'd like to know what are the rights of such published materials and whether I can use them with no fear of being a criminal.

Some stuff cannot be copyrighted, for example, if you extract a hand played by a wc player at a bbo vugraph to use for teaching, that is already in the public domain, and the actions of that wc player are also.

I have seen hands extracted from BBO being published in books, I doubt that BBO gets royalties from it. What the author in question has copyrighted is the layout presented in his book and the comments he created.

If yoiu have the book and post on the net one or two hands and document it, ie, joebridge says in page 20 blah blah blah, that is fair use. If you copy a whole chapter of his book and sell it, then that is copyright infirngement.

I think the rules of bridge should be copyrighted under the same conditions as cooking recipes are. The list of ingredients, and instructions, cannot be copyrighted.

So, if you use a hand from mollo's menagerie, the hand and bidding and play is not copyrighted. What is copyrighted is the Rabbit`s joke.

[kenberg]

As a prof, I dealt some with such matters. As with many things in life I mostly trusted that common sense would carry me through.

My understanding was that if I wanted to photocopy some stuff on sort of a spur of the moment basis I could hand it out as long as it was not excessive. Handing out copies of copyrighted stuff as a regular part of the course was more iffy. Of course photocopying pages, or several pages, is not the same as using a problem hand with your own thoughts on that hand.

You might think of, say, calculus texts. I swear that with most of them only (perhaps) the authors can tell one from another. They all have someone swimming or canoeing or something across water at some speed and then walking through a field at another speed and asking for the path that minimizes the time. So very modest modification of standard stuff seems to pass muster.

In my more advanced classes, if I used examples from the literature I made it a point to be clear about the source. This seems to me to be a matter of courtesy and fairness, whatever the law might be. I never had any problems, but I can't say I ever became a legal expert on the subject.

[phil_20686]

If the hand is a real "hand" it is considered to be in the public domain by virtue of being a historical event. If it is a construction by the author it is considered intellectual property. In practice it would be impossible to prove that any given problem was one rather than the other. The analysis of the hand would be considered copyrighted if it appeared in a book, but not if it appeared in a public forum. But assuming that the analysis was correct, it would be tough to prove that it wasnt also your analysis...

Regarding conventions. I think if you use a convention in a competition of any kind it is considered to be in the public domain. Same goes for chess openings, or a new way to hold your bat in table tennis etc.

I think if you are doing classes, you should try to avoid using problems from books, partly because it feels unethical, and partly because it means that your students will recognise the hands if they should read the books. There are plenty of problems that will appear in the normal course of playing bridge, and if you make a determined effort to spot them you can amass a large collection in a short time.

[kayin801]

"So what did your alert of 2♦ mean?"

"Oh it showed a good raise of hearts with 4+ spades as well, it's completely artificial"

"Oh, that's a cool convention, I'll try it sometime"

"Sorry, we came up with it, it's copyrighted and only we can use it"

[mgoetze]

kayin801, on 2010-November-19, 09:22, said:

"Oh, that's a cool convention, I'll try it sometime"

"Sorry, we came up with it, it's copyrighted and only we can use it"

Sorry, that's ridiculous. If you want to prevent other people from using your convention you need to apply for a patent.

[jeffford76]

phil_20686, on 2010-November-19, 07:40, said:

If the hand is a real "hand" it is considered to be in the public domain by virtue of being a historical event. If it is a construction by the author it is considered intellectual property. In practice it would be impossible to prove that any given problem was one rather than the other. The analysis of the hand would be considered copyrighted if it appeared in a book, but not if it appeared in a public forum.

This last part isn't true, at least in the USA. Anything you write automatically has copyright, even in a public forum. Recently a cooking magazine shut down after getting caught using verbatim writing from web pages. (See here for some details.)

[babalu1997]

kayin801, on 2010-November-19, 09:22, said:

"So what did your alert of 2♦ mean?"

"Oh it showed a good raise of hearts with 4+ spades as well, it's completely artificial"

"Oh, that's a cool convention, I'll try it sometime"

"Sorry, we came up with it, it's copyrighted and only we can use it"

Well the only patented bid is the redouble.

It has been patented and only people who pay royalties use it at bbo, the royalty is about $1100 per board.

sorry they take no new members there.

[1eyedjack]

Zelandakh, on 2010-November-19, 05:47, said:

Unless local laws state differently you should be able to use such information when not making money from the material.

I don't think that this is true, unless by "you should be able to ..." you mean "it would be more desirable if it were legal to ..." on which I pass no comment.

But if you mean that the laws generally permit such actions, those to re-distribute without charge copyrighted music and videos via peer-to-peer torrents are not making money from the material, but they are most definitely infringing copyright.

[Zelandakh]

The difference between these 2 cases, jack, is that the pirating of music demonstrably hurts the economic interest of the copyright holder. In the case of using a small portion of a published work this is not the case. When I was a researcher at university I learned the 10% rule, that is that you can take intellectual work from a book or paper and re-use it providing that you change it by at least 10%. I personally think this is a silly rule but the profs assured me it is the case. Anyone who has read research papers will recognise the massive amount of plagiarism that is used in academic circles, presumably following this rule to the limit.

So using bridge problems on Twitter for non-monetary purposes is ok providing that you only use a small proportion of the material from any one source. Distributing music, film, or large chunks of written material is not ok. Ideally you would also change 5 or 6 small cards from the problem to satisfy the 10% rule. I think all of this was reasonably clear from my first post although I felt it better not to go into details.

[TimG]

I think you are wrong about changing small spot card (and other stuff). Changing the spot cards does not change the essence of the material. For that matter, it is the analysis of the hand that is important in copyright consideration. For instance, you can't copyright baseball stats themselves, but you can copyright the manner in which they are presented, the accompanying description of the events. Similar with phone listings.

[Siegmund]

People generally only sue as a last resort. It's very possible that you may receive a cease-and-desist letter from an author or publisher or their attorneys, requiring you to remove material you used without permission and not do it again. (You have the choice between complying, and fighting a court case over whether your use was fair use.)

I've never had anybody say no when I've asked about reusing small amounts of material for a local class. I am not sure you'd get the same reaction if you're making a series of problems freely available on the internet. At some point they'll have a case that people can read your blog instead of buying a book.

Really, it's not that hard to properly cite things, or to properly create new material. (And if it really IS hard for you to create a hand that illustrates a point you want to make... well... that's a good clue that someone else put a lot of work into creating the hand in his book and you shouldn't steal his intellectual property.) Twitter a particularly dangerous format, in this regard, because there's a temptation to skip over giving credit to save space.

[barmar]

Meckwell own the copyright on the written form of their system notes, but copyright only applies to text, not the ideas embodied in them. So as long as you don't copy their notes, you can still play their system.

It's conceivable that someone could patent their bidding system as a "process". But this seems like a remote possibility, I think it may be too subjective. I expect patentable processes are more mechanical, something you could put in an instruction manual for a clerk to follow (the classic example is double-entry bookkeeping).

Regarding articles in bridge publications, I think it depends on how much you copy, and where it came from. Only creative works are subject to copyright, not simple facts. So if Bridge World is reporting on the results of a tournament, the hands in the tournament are safe for you to copy, since they're historical facts; but you can't copy the text of the report, since that came from the reporter's mind. And a hand from a Menagerie or Cthulhu story is a creative work of the author, so it gets more protection. And the surrounding story is definitely protected (and the authors could probably have trademarked Cthulhu, Hideous Hog, Rueful Rabbit, etc. if they wanted, but I think it may be too late now).

[mgoetze]

barmar, on 2010-November-20, 02:02, said:

(and the authors could probably have trademarked Cthulhu, [...] but I think it may be too late now).

Only 84 years too late.