Legal Aspects of Game Collections
There has been some recent abuse of the ability to export professional games as SGF from SmartGo, and some unfortunate confusion on the legal status of game collections. We want to clarify our position.
- We don't think individual uncommented games that contain just the main line of play can be copyright.
- We do believe that collections of games deserve copyright as a compilation based on the selection and arrangement of their contents. However, as far as we are aware, this notion has not yet been tested in court.
- Collections of games created in the European Union can be protected under the European Database Directive. That "sui generis" law makes it illegal to extract and/or re-utilize a substantial number of games without permission of the database creator.
Please respect the hard work and substantial investment that has gone into creating collections of professional games, and make it possible for the creators to keep growing those collections. Thank you.