Andreas Bovens is now in Tokyo studying Japanese copyright law. He visited me at Aoyama Gakuin yesterday and kindly gave a short blogging introduction to students in my postgraduate seminar.
We also discussed some copyright issues. One of them was the question if records of chess (or Go) games are or should be protected by copyright. I have been looking at that problem recently.
One interesting aspect is the fact that there is no such copyright protection in China or Korea. That, however, neither limits the popularity of the game in those countries, nor does it restrict the income of Chinese and Korean professional Go players, who obviously can find ways to get paid very well without copyright protection.
That seems to be some empiric evidence against the ex ante justification of copyright that without a copyright system there is no sufficient incentive to create.
On the other hand, if you have a copyright system at all, I really don't see any reason to discriminate against the creative effort of chess or Go players. There is much more thought expressed in Go games than in most writings or photographs.
And the copyright status of game records might be interesting for other games as well. For example, recently Slashdot pointed to an article saying that the gross Ebay value of all items in the EverQuest game exceeds the GNP of India.
What exactly is someone selling when auctioning off a "level 50 powerful warrior" for $500? Does the seller have any copyright in the result of several thousand hours of gaming effort?
And does he need that copyright as an incentive to play?
These seem to be interesting questions, all related to the simple problem if there is a copyright for a chess or Go game record.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at May 26, 2004 06:06 PM | TrackBack