What stops people from freely distributing existing chess game databases?

I also don't follow the logic here. I thought it was established that game scores themselves were not copyrightable. So is the contention that a single game score is not, but a collection is, presumably because of the work that goes into making it, or the expert opinion involved in filtering?

I think your right, it is the work that went into collecting the information.  A telephone directory can be copyrighted, but nothing stops you from going out and collecting the information for your own directory.  That is why telephone directories contain intentional mistakes, so it can be proved that you copied the information and didn't research it yourself.

If this law applied, then possession of a list of the intentional mistakes (watermarks) would be quite valuable.

Does anybody know if chess.com does their own updates using TWIC?

This is completely wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

This case both rejects the telephone directory example and the sweat of the brow doctrine implied by your post.

@mark100net Thanks for the link, a good read. So then this leaves us (from my post #19) with "the expert opinion involved in filtering".

So if I spend hours filtering out "irrelevant" games, this alone would then result in a copyrightable collection. Add to that some notion of favorite players, players who I have determined spend a great deal of effort in their openings and are therefore worthy of inclusion in a specialty database, etc, and you have a clearly copyrightable artifact.

Given what I do in ChessBase, it is clear to me that some of my databases have this property. The question is whether the ChessBase database itself has this property.

The Feist ruling is important but would not apply here. In Feist the court noted that there was no orginality involved because every subscriber in the area was included. There was no creativity involved in selecting which subscribers to include or exclude precisely because they included all subscribers. 

Since all available chess games are not included in a collection, the collection as a collection is copyrightable and Feist would not apply. 

The problem is at 2500 the players dont often meet strange lines or just bad lines. Players around 2200 are good and will face crazy lines more oftne than 2500 players. 

I'm a constitutional/international lawyer, not an IP lawyer, but this has got me interested so I thought I'd see if I can find the answer.

There are two issues (I'm dealing with only US law here):

1) Is a chess game, in itself, copyrightable?
2) If not, is a compilation of chess games copyrightable?

Chess games

Copyright law is governed by the Copyright Act, which copyrights any "original work of authorship". This term is not defined, but the Feist case (already mentioned) explains this: "original" means creations, not discovered facts.

So, are chess games creations or facts? The article I posted above argues they are discovered facts and I agree. Just as 2+2=4 is a fact (as is any other mathematical formulation) chess is an incredibly complex series of mathematical axioms. 64 squares, movement of the pieces, these are all finite, pre-determined facts, all part of an enormous mathematical system.

Melekhina and Orkin note:
"In compliance with these rules, a finite number of sequences of moves can be made, even if the number is too vast for human or computer calculation. The players use their ingenuity to discover moves from
all possible options that would offer the most advantage in a given position. All chess moves available in a position are already present, made possible by the logical nature of the system. One must discover the best move, choosing from a selection of ‘legal’ or possible moves. The discovery of a move from a selection of predetermined possibilities renders each move factual."

I agree.

If we consider therefore, that each move is factual, we don't need to ask if chess games are "works of authorship" (which is another possible issue).  Aesthetics of a game is something seperate. Just as a physicist may find beauty in the laws of physics, or we admire the beauty of a prisitine landscape, that they exist is still only factual.

Chess games, not being "creative" in themselves, are not copyrightable. Again, this is a legal test: "creative" has a specific legal meaning, and may not always be the same as the common meaning. Once you make a choice to move X or Y, or you decide to walk or drive, the result becomes a fact, no matter how creative one thinks they might be in their f7 bishop sac.

Chess compilations

Compilations can be copyrightable, even if the original work is only fact. 17 USC § 103(b) explicitely provides for that:

"The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work ... The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material."

As rightly pointed out, Feist has explained this further. For a compliation to be copyright there must be an original or creative act involved in the compilation (a very low threshold). Feist rejected that phonebooks are copyright because no such act occured in compiling a telephone directory - it was merely a list of all information, like a dump of all chess games on chess.com; chess compilations that are more refined, however, are another matter.

Because chess games are selected, organised, labelled and annotated, chessbase or whoever else has added a mere "spark" or "minimal degree" of creativity. Annotation may not even be required. If variations etc., are included in the games then this would definitely qualify as adding a creative element to the database. Again, because of this standard, merely dumping all the games from any uncompiled list would not be copyright: there has been no creativity involved.

So, though chess games themselves may not be, I think chess compilations (which are more than just a dump of data) would be copyrightable.

FirebandX - your disagreement is not based in understanding of the minimal threshold Feist implies. 

Collections of facts are copyrightable provided there is some (very minimal) "creativity" involved in selecting which facts to include. That is how the law has been applied for a very long time, and precident matters. So you can disagree all you want, but unless you can find a court ruling that applies (and Feist actually supports copyrighting a collection that is not all-inclusive), then you don't have an argument to support your view. 

The one-word answer to the OP's original question is: greed.

Common sense has nothing to do with law. 

It should, but it doesn't. 

There is a difference between what the law "is" and what the law "should be". Just because we may want, or it is a good idea that the law say databases are not copyrightable doesn't mean thats what the law says. A lawyer's job is to describe the law as it exists (and hopefully avoid any normative comment). "Can I do this or that?" is a question of what the law says. If you want to talk about what the law should be, talk to your elected representative. It's ok if you dont like the law (which often, is fair enough), but don't shoot the messenger.

On that, yes, I agree with FirebrandX and Kingpatzer, that many laws lack common sense. Sometimes there is a specific reason for it (often very complex reasons, that have consequences we can't fully appreciate). Other times its just politics. Either way, this poster asked what the law "is". As much as we may not like it, it does seem pretty clear in this case.

Nothing stops you from freely distributing your databases and books (that you made)!

So the sub question, what if you take two databases and combine them or take a database and add 100 new games, would that be considered a new unique collection?

Thanks for your enlightening posts, I find this topic interesting.

In the Feist v. Rural case, proving that you had copied all the raw information did not seem to do much good. From my understanding of this thread, selecting games of Morozevich would be enough of a "creative" act to enable you to copyright your collection of games.

This is a fun thread 

What about the copyright laws in countries besides the US?

I don't know about other nations. But the question of adding "something" to the database is an interesting one. 

If someone makes up a game and includes that game, then that is a purely creative work, and not a fact -- since it did not transpire in reality. In such a case, copying that "something" (be it a game that did not happen, or a coninuation that didn't happen but was rather analysis that wasn't played after a resignation for example), is clearly a violation of copyright because it is precisely not factual data. 

So there's an inherent obligation on someone publishing a new database to ensure that the games being provided are indeed factual games and not creative imagined games designed to "watermark" a database. 

No, that someone would sue them for copyright infringement for selling their work of fiction, cost the company producing the new database for one count of copyright infringment for every sale, and cost the infringing company ludicrous amounts of money in having to defend against a predictable and obvious copyright infringement case that is pretty well guaranteed to require settlement and a huge payout. 

An invented game is not a fact. It is a create work. Including it in a database and distributing it against the license under which it was released is clear and unambiguous infringement. 

If that is correct (and it seems a reasonable assumption), and that is well known (and it seems to be largely accepted as being the case) then one has a duty based on that common knowledge to vet whatever one copies. 

I was more curious to the concept of if a database contained all true and factual games and was then combined or modified (by adding other games) if it by definition was a new unique collection.

I'm sure companies do slip some bogus information in for tracking purposes to prevent that kind of thing, I was just more curious on an interesting conversation level.