The Intellectual Property Oxymoron

[bob]

I would assume that the Stanford guy knows about the Crafty statement of copyright and the GPL and yet he still made those comments.

* This post is copyrighted by me, by the way.

I would not assume anything since he is clearly wrong...

[bob]

I seem to be having a little trouble getting through to you, but that's ok, I am used to compiler guys. They are generally very single minded, presumably due to some evolutionary bias, that makes it very difficult for them to see any side of an argument except their own. Makes them damn good compiler guys though. Let me try an analogy, as they usually work with my compiler guys.

The obvious analogy to what you are doing would be if someone emailed all the folks at this link:

http://www.cis.uab.edu/facstaff

With:

"Do you realize that one of your colleagues is carrying out an online forum hate campaign against the worlds leading chess software developer, Vasik Rajlich and in the process bringing the UAB into disrepute? PS. He believes he knows more about law than a Stanford Law Professor."

Attaching links to all of your forum posts (spanning at least three fora) comparing the Rybka author to a criminal/murderer and a link to the NYT article.

We don't know if this imaginary accusation about you to your colleagues is 100% true or false, I've seen people put cases for both sides of it, but it wouldn't be a sensible thing to do, would it? My advice to you is don't (appear?) to be guilty of hate-crime, even if Vas is "guilty" as you say.

Before your stance I was undecided but have come down on the side of the accused, I hope he manages to get some of his rich oil baron buddies to stump up for a defamation lawsuit, those guys have really deep pockets, perhaps in return for some Rybka Cluster software?

Happy Independence Day.

There is a difference. We proved beyond any doubt that Vas violated ICGA tournament rules. I don't see _any_ proof about the "hate campaign" which could backfire and cause a serious problem. It is easy to prove someone copied something. I don't think there's a chance that a legal action will happen, because (a) he will certainly lose since no false statement have been made by the ICGA and (b) it will drag all the existing evidence into public _again_, plus additional evidence, all for no gain and (c) it will cost a fortune, and usually suits are followed by counter-suits. One of which is pretty certain to be won.

[garybelton]

it will cost a fortune

Pocket change to a Sheik

One of the things that the law does is make bad human beings act like better human beings. Kicking a man and his family, while they are down, is not acting like a good human being.

[hgm]

It is not illegal to cheat, is it?

Try it on your IRS return.

Then it is called 'fraud', not 'cheating'... It might also be cheating, but the cheating part is not punishable. The fraud part is.

[K I Hyams]

One of the things that the law does is make bad human beings act like better human beings. Kicking a man and his family, while they are down, is not acting like a good human being.

If you go deeper than 1 ply you realise that, as a consequence of Rajlich's behaviour, pain was felt at a number of levels. Refusing to recognise or attempt to alleviate the pain of others "is not acting like a good human being".

In an earlier post, you made the statement below:

Before your stance I was undecided but have come down on the side of the accused,

I feel that I must compliment you on a novel approach, most of us decided upon the side on which we came down by looking at the evidence.

[bob]

it will cost a fortune

Pocket change to a Sheik

One of the things that the law does is make bad human beings act like better human beings. Kicking a man and his family, while they are down, is not acting like a good human being.

Who is kicking anyone? I have been defending the process/procedures used during the investigation, nothing more.

[bob]

One of the things that the law does is make bad human beings act like better human beings. Kicking a man and his family, while they are down, is not acting like a good human being.

If you go deeper than 1 ply you realise that, as a consequence of Rajlich's behaviour, pain was felt at a number of levels. Refusing to recognise or attempt to alleviate the pain of others "is not acting like a good human being".

In an earlier post, you made the statement below:

Before your stance I was undecided but have come down on the side of the accused,

I feel that I must compliment you on a novel approach, most of us decided upon the side on which we came down by looking at the evidence.

Key word being "most of us". This is the kind of person I would not want on a jury of any kind, because the jury is supposed to be a "finder of fact" not a "personal opinion about who I like better."

[wgarvin]

I just read that Fruit may have been a ripoff of your Crafty! It's possible that you just did yourself out of four world titles

"The 73% commonality of the Rybka evaluation code to the Fruit 2.1 code is used to highlight copying whereas the 54% commonality of Fruit 2.1 to Crafty 19.1 is ignored."

This was addressed yesterday by Mark Watkins in a post over at open-chess.org:
http://www.open-chess.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1475

Regarding 54% for Crafty/Fruit overlap (in D.2.3 of RYBKA_FRUIT.pdf): this was in a preliminary (and cruder) version of the EVAL_COMP analysis, with the final Crafty/Fruit number being 34% when the whole process of comparison had been decided upon. Furthermore, this 54% is unidirectional (that is, it measures the Fruit/Crafty overlap, but not the Crafty/Fruit overlap, and as mentioned therein, Crafty contains about 10-15 features that Fruit lacks). The Rybka/Fruit number in that comparison was 78.3%, not 73%. Indeed, the whole EVAL_COMP document was produced precisely to quantify a relationship between raw percentages and expected "random" occurrences. As there didn't seem to be any great need in distinguishing between a 1 in 10^6 and a 1 in 10^8 (or more) occurrence, rather crude statistical measures were used (and at any rate, whatever method was chosen would be subject to question, while Rajlich was free to re-analyse the data if he thought he got a raw deal, etc.).

That whole thread is worth reading, for anyone who has concerns about the methodology. (But for those who simply have an axe to grind, then I wouldn't bother reading it.)

[K I Hyams]

One of the things that the law does is make bad human beings act like better human beings. Kicking a man and his family, while they are down, is not acting like a good human being.

If you go deeper than 1 ply you realise that, as a consequence of Rajlich's behaviour, pain was felt at a number of levels. Refusing to recognise or attempt to alleviate the pain of others "is not acting like a good human being".

In an earlier post, you made the statement below:

Before your stance I was undecided but have come down on the side of the accused,

I feel that I must compliment you on a novel approach, most of us decided upon the side on which we came down by looking at the evidence.

Key word being "most of us". This is the kind of person I would not want on a jury of any kind, because the jury is supposed to be a "finder of fact" not a "personal opinion about who I like better."

Yes. Much of my interest in this case stems from the fact that I am appalled by the implications for the jury system of the reactions to this case of many of those on the Rybka site and some of those on this site.

[garybelton]

I can see that in your mind you believe that you are not kicking, but that you are explaining the facts. That is because you are unaware of how you come across sometimes, but I have seen that before in compiler guys, as I mentioned it's an evolutionary bias that makes them very effective programmers.

The main thing that I find offensive with you here is there are basic chess ideas in Crafty that you have not attributed (in main.c or anywhere else) to the originators of those ideas, and yet you claim Crafty to be 100% your own original work, so by definition this act of non-attribution makes you a plagiarist. Yet, you are quite happy to take the moral high ground with another chess programming plagiarist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYdJqSG3K6c

It's simple, if you were to put a few lines into Crafty's main.c saying "In Crafty I use idea X invented by programmer Y" for +every+ chess idea you used that is not your own, then you would no longer be a plagiarist. But I would still have a problem with all of the other chess programming plagiarists who do not do the same. Once you and all the other accusers are squeaky-clean non-plagiarists, then I will take you more seriously.

Here is one simple example:

Code: Select all

~/crafty-23.4$ grep -i shannon *
~/crafty-23.4$ 

How many more are there?

Until then, perhaps this proverb will make you and the other chess programming accusers see where I am coming from ... "people who live in glass houses should not throw stones".

Just to prove that there was something in that directory:

Code: Select all

~/crafty-23.4$ grep -i hyatt *
annotate.c&#58;      "<LINK rev=\"made\" href=\http&#58;//anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http&#58;//www.talkchess.com/forum/"hyatt@cis.uab.edu\"></HEAD>\n");
main.c&#58; *  Crafty, copyright 1996-2010 by Robert M. Hyatt, Ph.D., Associate Professor *
main.c&#58; *     Robert Hyatt, University of Alabama at Birmingham.                      *
speak&#58;my $soundpath = "/home/hyatt/crafty/sound";
~/crafty-23.4$ 

All I see is plagiarists accusing a plagiariser.

I should say that I contend that unattributed idea copying is equivalent to unattributed code copying but I think you know that already.