I posted this as a question before: Are game records for a game of Go (or chess, the problem is the same) protected by copyright?
Today I discussed this with Prof. Handa, who is President of Aoyama Gakuin University, a professor at the Faculty of Law, and a specialist on copyright.
He said: Game records should be protected by copyright. However, there is no case law on this question yet, and the Japanese copyright law is ambiguous.
I took a sceptical view. There is no copyright protection for other competitive sports. If Hideki Matsui drives in a home run, as he did in his first game on New York home ground yesterday, he will get paid for that (rather well), but he won't get a copyright for the video footage.
In the world of Go, the players get paid for winning by sponsors of tournaments. No difference to other competition sports. So arguably there is no need for copyright to ensure the economic basis for professional Go playing.
If that is so, and the law is ambiguous right now, I think at the least a clarifying amendment of the copyright law would be necessary to extend copyright protection to Go game records.
One reason for that: Article 119 of the Japanese copyright law. That makes it a crime to violate copyright. That in turn makes a restrictive interpretation of the law necessary. You can't just go ahead and use creative analogies for the purpose of enlarging the scope of copyright law, since that would violate Article 39 of the Japanese Constitution, a prohibition of ex post facto laws.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at April 9, 2003 01:34 PM | TrackBack