From: "Samuel H. Sloan (my real name)" AOL COM> Date: 26 oct 1995 Subject: Annotated Games vs. Unannotated Games Annotated Chess Games vs. Unannotated Games By Sam Sloan Somebody has posted a question as to why there are so many unannotated games in the Internet, but virtually no annotated games. There are several reasons why you can expect almost never to see annotated games posted on the Internet. The first and foremost concerns copyright problems. The law is well established that chess games or moves cannot be copyrighted. However, any notes or comments written about a game are protected by international copyright law. As a result, if you see two grandmasters playing a game, you can stand by their board, write down their moves, and later publish and sell the moves you have watched them play, without paying them a dime. The grandmasters may not like this and indeed have often complained about this, but that is the law. This law is not just for chess. It applies to all historical and sporting events of any kind. (By the way, in Japan, the situation is different. In Japan, the players of games such as shogi and chess own the rights to their own games. Consequently, the newspapers must pay for the rights to publish their games. This explains the fact that in Japan, most go and shogi tournaments are sponsored by newspapers. By putting up the money to sponsor a tournament, the newspaper insures that only it, and not some rival newspaper, has the right to publish the games of that tournament. This also in part explains the fact that the top go and shogi players in Japan become quite wealthy and in some cases become millionaires, whereas, in the West, many chess masters suffer in poverty or else make the supreme sacrifice and go out and get a job.) Because grandmasters are trying their best to make a living from chess, they expect to be paid for annotating their games. This means that if somebody copies an annotated game out of Chess Life magazine for example, puts that game on disk and sells or distributes it, without paying the grandmaster who wrote the notes, the distributor might be in violation of international copyright laws. This is one of the most complicated areas of law. There are many exceptions. There is, for example, the doctrine of "fair use". "Fair Use" means that, for example, a book reviewer may quote a few passages from a book that he is reviewing in order to illustrate the literary style of the book, without violating copyright laws. However, if he publishes one or two chapters of the book, that might go beyond "fair use". Exactly where the line is drawn is something for the courts to decide. Another problem is that, as a general rule, copyrights expire 50 years after the death of the author. This means that you cannot publish the annotations of former World Champion Alexander Alekhine, unless you have the permission of his heirs (if he had any), because Alekhine died less than 50 years ago, in 1946. However, next year, after the 50 years will have passed, anybody be able to publish annotations written by Alekhine. This explains the fact that, a few years ago, new editions of "My System" by Nimzovich came out. More than 50 years had just passed since Nimzovich had died. (Also, Nimzovich had left no heirs, an important consideration, since there was nobody left to bring a lawsuit.) However, the vast majority of published chess notes were written by somebody who is either still alive or else who died less than 50 years ago. Of course, it is possible that some of the authors of these notes might have no objection to having them posted on the Internet without receiving payment. However, most chess database enthusiasts are not going to take the time or the trouble to search out the author of the notes and obtain his or her permission. As a result, they just immediately strip out any notes or comments that they happen to receive on any games they get. Thus, even games which had notes originally, will not have them any more by the time they are posted on the Internet. There are still other reasons why games with notes are not posted on the Internet. It so happens that I have been entering around 30-50 games per day lately on my chess databases. I have found that it takes me an average of less than 5 minutes to enter an unannotated chess game, but a game with notes requires more than 30 minutes of my time, depending on how deep or extensive the notes are. Thus, I can enter more than 6 unannotated games in the same length of time that it takes me to enter one annotated game. Also, there are not that many annotated games out there. If you take all of the great collections of annotated games, including games with notes by Alekhine, Botvinnik, Fischer and so on, plus all of the annotated games published in Chess Life magazine and in all of the other chess magazines worldwide, and add them all together, you probably still will have only a few thousand annotated games in the entire history of chess. In contrast, the big chess database collectors and vendors, such as Eric Schiller and Inside Chess, are selling 400,000 to 500,000 games on disk (unannotated, of course). I am well aware that the vast majority of members of the chess playing public wants games with notes and also with lots of diagrams. No chess publisher has ever made any significant amount of money publishing unannotated games. Nobody wants them. David Levy, who at that time was the world's largest publisher of unannotated games, once told me to stay away from them. The reading and buying public wants notes! What the vast majority of the paying chess public wants to read are not the games at all. What they want are amusing anecdotes about chess players and so on. Most readers are not capable of playing over the games in their heads and it is too much trouble to set up the pieces on the board, so, when they read a chess book, they just read the words; they do not play over the games. Finally, there is the problem of who is going to write these notes. Not many people are interested in reading notes written by relatively weak chess players. In order for notes to have any commercial value, in most cases they must be written by a name chess player who will usually have a rating of at least 2400, if not higher. This person must also have a flair for writing and a good literary style. The notes will generally have to be written in English, as there is not much of a commercial market for notes in other languages. However, among the world's players rated over 2400 (of which there are less than 1000, I believe) hardly any of them can speak more than a few words of English, and most of those who can speak English are not greatly talented or gifted as writers. And most of the few strong chess players who are also gifted writers (Grandmaster Larry Evans comes to mind) are already fully employed. They are certainly not going to spend their valuable time writing notes which are going to be posted for free on the Internet. Sam Sloan