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Copyrights and Book Positions

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Sunday, 23 May 2010, at 8:38 p.m.

In Response To: Copyrights and Book Positions (lenny)

Possibly we're not envisaging the same scenario in our minds.

What you're arguing, I think, is that something like Bagai's book, which takes positions from a variety of different books and repackages them differently, doesn't violate copyright. Bagai takes "facts" from a variety of sources and the facts themselves are not copyrighted. (Bagai's book does more than what I'm saying here, but let's keep it simple for the sake of argument.)

On the other hand, I would argue that reproducing (say) Robertie's list of 501 positions does violate copyright because Robertie exercised creative choice in assembling the positions. As you quoted, copyright protects only the elements that owe their origin to the compiler—the selection, coordination, and arrangement of facts.

In other words it's not just as simple as saying that you can grab any collection of 500 backgammon positions and claim immunity from copyright prosecution just because the content of your work consists of "facts," just as you can't just grab any collection of 500 English words and claim that all you've done is to assemble 500 "facts" that anybody can look up in a dictionary.

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