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7 Bull. Copyright Soc'y U.S.A. 214 (1959-1960)
Copyright in Chess Games

handle is hein.journals/jocoso7 and id is 252 raw text is: 292. COPYRIGHT IN CHESS GAMES By RICHARD WINCOR* While it is always easy, perhaps too easy, to suggest that any cultural activity is a fragment of the tense dialogue between East and West, it is never- theless true that the honorable and ancient game of chess has a curious stature that ranks it with the theatre, ballet and other entertainments that have become part of the Cold War. (The temptation is to say pawns instead of entertain- ment, so deeply has the nomenclature of chess become embedded in our thinking.) In any event, chess is a part of our civilization. The excellence of the Russians at this art has done them no harm, and the emergence of several young American players of great skill, together with rising stars from the Scandinavian and Latin countries, has insured a continued prominence for chess in our time - which it well deserves. For chess is no ordinary game. It is a battle, an art, a science, an all-out embracement of a contest unique in that its outcome does nobody any real good but it produces an almost morbid interest and pleasure. More to the point, it is a creative function. Perhaps it is not going too far to say that the sequence of moves in a particular game constitutes a writing of an author in the broad sense with which that ambiguous concept has become invested. If this is so, it may be entitled to copyright protection pursuant to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Whether or not this is sociologically desirable is not the whole question. Before publication, certainly, property may come into existence and automatically be protected by common law copyright whether or not we approve the subject matter and the economic results of such protection. A foolish letter or a bad play is a proper subject for common law copyright; so, too, may be the moves in a chess game.' The first problem that suggests itself is one of ownership. An artificial chess problem, like a puzzle, presents less difficulty, but in a real game there are two players. There is little logic in a winner-take-all approach; both players have made creative contributions to the final work. In fact one player may have played brilliantly only to botch everything at the end by a sudden blunder. A * A member of the New York Bar. 1. The notion that chess moves may be copyrighted is not entirely a new one. See, for example, Kohler, Is There a Copyright in a Chess Game, in Weiner Schachzeitung, 1909, pp. 169-170, suggesting that a chess game may not be copyrighted, but that an unauthorized report of a private game might constitute an actionable interference with the players' right of privacy. 214 Bulletin. Copyright Society of the U.S.A.

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