The Intellectual Property Oxymoron

[garybelton]

Thanks for the link (and your time).

[garybelton]

If Vas wants to contest anything with respect to Rybka 3, he can produce source code to prove originality.

I believe that while he intends to make money from chess automata he is not going to do that. I think this because Rybka UCI somewhat died a death once Rybka 3 got reversed engineered, so looking at it from his perspective I can only think he would rather lose his World Championship titles rather than potentially give away any ideas he has come up with since Rybka 3 that will make him a living. Do you think now he will reverse engineer new UCI engines and add their tricks to the cloud Rybka offering? I don't see why he would not.

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."

[garybelton]

cheating is the right word.

In the NYT article you contributed to at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/cross ... -code.html

"Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford law professor who specializes in science and technology issues, wrote in an e-mail that because Fruit and Crafty are freely available may mean that Mr. Rajlich is not guilty of misconduct if he copied some of the code."

Question for you: if this Stanford law professor is correct in that the Rybka author is not guilty of misconduct (in the legal sense), is it not sensible to refrain from using potentially defamatory statements such as "cheater" in public places?

If the Stanford law professor is not correct, in a legal sense, and you know better than him, then I suppose that could explain your gung-ho nature on these online fora.

Wouldn't it be less risky for you to wait? To first get a ruling on any misconduct taking place (in the legal sense), before opening yourself up to a potential lawsuit? Are you 100% sure they would rule against him? Stranger court cases have gone the opposite way to what you might expect in the past.

[garybelton]

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.

[hgm]

Question for you: if this Stanford law professor is correct in that the Rybka author is not guilty of misconduct (in the legal sense), is it not sensible to refrain from using potentially defamatory statements such as "cheater" in public places?

It is not illegal to cheat, is it?

[garybelton]

It is not illegal to cheat, is it?

Try it on your IRS return.

[wgarvin]

"Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford law professor who specializes in science and technology issues, wrote in an e-mail that because Fruit and Crafty are freely available may mean that Mr. Rajlich is not guilty of misconduct if he copied some of the code."

Question for you: if this Stanford law professor is correct in that the Rybka author is not guilty of misconduct (in the legal sense), is it not sensible to refrain from using potentially defamatory statements such as "cheater" in public places?

If the Stanford law professor is not correct, in a legal sense, and you know better than him, then I suppose that could explain your gung-ho nature on these online fora.

Don't worry. He's not correct.

Crafty 19.0's license contains this:

* All rights reserved. No part of this program may be reproduced in any *
* form or by any means, for other than your personal use, without the *
* express written permission of the author. This program may not be used in *
* whole, nor in part, to enter any computer chess competition without *
* written permission from the author. Such permission will include the *
* requirement that the program be entered under the name "Crafty" so that *
* the program's ancestry will be known. *

So the Crafty license was certainly violated, which means that pre-Beta Rybka's use of that Crafty code was certainly infringing Bob's copyright.

Fruit 2.1 was under the GPL v2 license, and Rajlich has definitely not complied with the terms of that license either, so he was probably infringing Fabien's copyright there too.

[garybelton]

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.

[bob]

If Vas wants to contest anything with respect to Rybka 3, he can produce source code to prove originality.

I believe that while he intends to make money from chess automata he is not going to do that. I think this because Rybka UCI somewhat died a death once Rybka 3 got reversed engineered, so looking at it from his perspective I can only think he would rather lose his World Championship titles rather than potentially give away any ideas he has come up with since Rybka 3 that will make him a living. Do you think now he will reverse engineer new UCI engines and add their tricks to the cloud Rybka offering? I don't see why he would not.

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

That is simply false, and it is based on first-hand knowledge since I have looked at the fruit eval several times during this investigation. That was just someone trying to confuse the issue talking about copyright violation where you have to prove that the copied thing is original before you can prove a copyright violation where something was taken from it.

The ICGA investigation was not about copyright violation, but rather about tournament rule violation.

"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."

[bob]

cheating is the right word.

In the NYT article you contributed to at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/cross ... -code.html

"Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford law professor who specializes in science and technology issues, wrote in an e-mail that because Fruit and Crafty are freely available may mean that Mr. Rajlich is not guilty of misconduct if he copied some of the code."

Question for you: if this Stanford law professor is correct in that the Rybka author is not guilty of misconduct (in the legal sense), is it not sensible to refrain from using potentially defamatory statements such as "cheater" in public places?

If the Stanford law professor is not correct, in a legal sense, and you know better than him, then I suppose that could explain your gung-ho nature on these online fora.

Wouldn't it be less risky for you to wait? To first get a ruling on any misconduct taking place (in the legal sense), before opening yourself up to a potential lawsuit? Are you 100% sure they would rule against him? Stranger court cases have gone the opposite way to what you might expect in the past.

First, he is assuming that Crafty and Fruit are simply free, open-source programs. His assumption is wrong. Both are released under a license agreement that specifically prohibits what happened. Right at the top of main.c in Crafty, in fact...

Second, since his assumption is wrong, everything else he opined is meaningless...