Michael Sherwin wrote:Strelka 1.0 is only suspect because of the data tables that it used from Rybka. Data is data and is not copyrightable no matter where it came from. Just because Vasik gathered the data does not mean that others can not use the data. The data already existed in the database. That is why it is called a 'data'-base. Vasik did not create the data.
I would not be so sure about that, things are far more complicated.
For a start, in the digital era everything is data.
Now take a commercial song, make an MP3 out of it, encrypt it and swap even and odd bytes. Looks like random data eh? But it's not, and you'll be infringing copyright by distributing it.
Or consider the football championship. You have friends in the stadiums that tell you how games are going in real-time, by phone. You use this data to update and internet site, also in real-time. Should be fine, eh? After all it's just data, collected independently, about something that is happening in the world. Knock, knock... cops at the door! (YMMV, might be country-dependent).
One last... just look at your arm and go deeper: skin, tissue, cells, DNA, genes, patents. Ops! Those are hardly original are they? Nature anyone? Yet some genes are patentable under current law, incredible!
Vasik must have found a way to compute efficiently coefficients and tables to use for evaluating a chess position. Maybe he started from public data, I don't know. But nonetheless I would think twice before assuming that what he got is not copyrightable.