fling wrote on 03/04/14 at 23:08:07:
I am not sure I have much to add to the debate. But I need to say something.
I thought yours was a thoughtful and excellent post. I may not agree with everything you said, but I certainly respect your views.
Quote: That critical question is copyright issues.
Actually, I don't think this is the critical question at all. It frankly doesn't matter whether lifting someone else's analysis is a copyright violation or not. We can all agree that it is wrong to do that, can't we? To me, the critical question here is whether that is what happened.
Quote: Just because you don't have time to read everything doesn't mean you can say it is ok to claim an old idea as yours with the excuse that you haven't seen it.
I see what you are saying, but at the same time, I don't think an author of an opening book has to research everything out there. In fact, it seems ridiculous to me to insist that an author has to check sources from the 1800s to make sure that a move he is suggesting has never been suggested before.
To put another way, I don't see anything wrong with an author who is working with a good commercial database and analyzing lines with the help of his computer, spotting what to him appears to be a new idea and saying that in his book. Yes, ok, maybe he missed the fact that the move had been played before in an obscure game or a postal game. Certainly, that happens. But it doesn't mean that the move wasn't a move or idea the author came up with on his own.
I also think it would be silly to insist that authors caveat everything to ensure that they aren't accidentally claiming something is a new idea when it isn't. Do we really want authors proposing a move and then having to explain, "in analyzing the Carlsen game, it struck me that he could have played this move, which might have been a novelty, but I confess that I haven't checked 19th century periodicals, the under12 championships, or the transcript of the press conference to see if Magnus might have mentioned this move after the game. So it may not actually be a novelty, even though I think it is and am proud of having found it after 32 hours of painstaking analysis on my own."
Ok, I am exaggerating to make a point. But to require authors to do anything like this would make the books unreadable.
Authors should check reasonable sources. What's reasonable will depend on the nature of the book. But if you're going to insist that every author of an opening book research every conceivable source, then opening books are never going to get written.
Quote: *I have pointed out that there have been several "novelties" in QC books for moves played long time before publication date. Sometimes in corr. games, but even OTB. To say that these are novelties just because they don't exist in a certain database is to me a bit dubious ...
Again, I think it has to be reasonable. Obviously, an author can't use a 10-game database and then claim his moves are novelties. But at the same time, there has to be an upper limit. In the old informant days, a novelty meant that the move had not appeared in the informant before. Everyone knew this because the informant folks told readers that was what the N meant. Katar suggested QC do something similar, and they should. Would at least put an end to any question of how QC is using the N, although I suppose people will still criticize them for not having consulted a large enough database. If you use mega base and correspondence bases is that ok, or do you have to scour the internet and old printed materials for even more games? Frankly, at some point, it just gets silly. How much do you reasonably have to check before you are OK to proceed?
Quote:*The chess world is too little to have these kinds of fights. Seriously.
Totally agree.