On the ownership of TakChess

[mclane]

The forum belongs to the members and it has to be democratically decided who moderates it.
It cannot be OWNED by one person. Otherwise its more hijacked then hosted.

In the moment you allow ONE person to be admin, moderator, owner of the server etc.
the free community develops into the opposite.

You'll never understand - of course he never was a moderator... and also he just 'inherited' the whole thing from Steven Schwartz.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990224070 ... m/ccc.html

The posts on the Computer-Chess Club message board do not necessarily agree (nor disagree) with the opinions of Your Move Chess & Games, I.C.D. Corporation, or Computer Chess Reports, and these companies do not control, and have no say in, what is posted or how it is posted. Nor do any of these organizations have any say or control over decisions made by the moderators.

We had many years now success going the democratical way, from 1997 to 2021.

Yeah, we have seen how 'democratic' it was in several periods in time, especially remembering one with you as a 'moderator',
hopefully this will never happen again.

When i was moderator it was not in any way different from what happened before.
the difference came with the technician beeing implemented by the owner as an admin.

Somebody who was not democratically elected suddenly decided in a hierarchy ABOVE the moderator decisions.
this is not democratical. its dictatorship.

if we begin new from a scratch it should be made clear that only those people who have a mandate from the community via elections are allowed to CONTROL vital functions.

[smatovic]

...

Whatever your issues were in the past, whatever you are projecting now onto whomever, it does not help the current situation (and it did not help in the CTF case btw.). Try to be a part of the solution, fix your mistakes as founder from the past. The founders handed over the domain and forum to a company, without any written contract? The new owner who bought that company claims ownership, well, he hosted that domain and forum for ~10 years, right?

...

It can not be *that* hard to setup a registered society. In Germany we have a culture of "eingetragener Verein", people setup r.s. for every kind of group of interest, stamp collecting clubs, sport clubs, railway model clubs, etc. We just need some core members who are willing to invest some time, get into the paper work, once setup it is not that much work I guess. I realize the short way, just register some domain, clone the forum, TC.xy is up and running again, but how long will it take until it breaks up again? We are in no hurry, enough time to do it right this time imho.

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Srdja

[smatovic]

Regarding registered society, maybe we have three options, a) U.S. b) Netherlands c) Germany? Maybe some active TC members can ponder on if they are interested to setup a legal entity with others from their country, a 'Computer Chess Club r.s.' with the primary goal of hosting TC...I can throw this idea just into the void, if we are really such a group of unorganised individuals, then a hosting sponsor like Chess USA was and is maybe the better solution.

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Srdja

[Rebel]

...

Whatever your issues were in the past, whatever you are projecting now onto whomever, it does not help the current situation (and it did not help in the CTF case btw.). Try to be a part of the solution, fix your mistakes as founder from the past. The founders handed over the domain and forum to a company, without any written contract? The new owner who bought that company claims ownership, well, he hosted that domain and forum for ~10 years, right?

This is a misunderstanding. Talkchess.com always belonged to chess.usa. At the time (1997) there was no such forum software as phpBB and Tim M. from chessusa literally wrote one. And so we could talk. The efforts and responsibilities of the founder-group were to setup a working democratic moderated forum and Tim M. did a fantastic job rewarding all the features the founder group wanted. About a year when we noticed everything was running smoothly the founder group decided they were no longer needed and dissolved itself.

...

It can not be *that* hard to setup a registered society. In Germany we have a culture of "eingetragener Verein", people setup r.s. for every kind of group of interest, stamp collecting clubs, sport clubs, railway model clubs, etc. We just need some core members who are willing to invest some time, get into the paper work, once setup it is not that much work I guess. I realize the short way, just register some domain, clone the forum, TC.xy is up and running again, but how long will it take until it breaks up again? We are in no hurry, enough time to do it right this time imho.

--
Srdja

[smatovic]

...

Whatever your issues were in the past, whatever you are projecting now onto whomever, it does not help the current situation (and it did not help in the CTF case btw.). Try to be a part of the solution, fix your mistakes as founder from the past. The founders handed over the domain and forum to a company, without any written contract? The new owner who bought that company claims ownership, well, he hosted that domain and forum for ~10 years, right?

This is a misunderstanding. Talkchess.com always belonged to chess.usa. At the time (1997) there was no such forum software as phpBB and Tim M. from chessusa literally wrote one. And so we could talk. The efforts and responsibilities of the founder-group were to setup a working democratic moderated forum and Tim M. did a fantastic job rewarding all the features the founder group wanted. About a year when we noticed everything was running smoothly the founder group decided they were no longer needed and dissolved itself.

Thanks for clarification. So the founders did not own the domain, the software, and made no deal about the content, just how to run the community. There is imo little to discuss regarding ownership.

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Srdja

[Rebel]

...

Whatever your issues were in the past, whatever you are projecting now onto whomever, it does not help the current situation (and it did not help in the CTF case btw.). Try to be a part of the solution, fix your mistakes as founder from the past. The founders handed over the domain and forum to a company, without any written contract? The new owner who bought that company claims ownership, well, he hosted that domain and forum for ~10 years, right?

This is a misunderstanding. Talkchess.com always belonged to chess.usa. At the time (1997) there was no such forum software as phpBB and Tim M. from chessusa literally wrote one. And so we could talk. The efforts and responsibilities of the founder-group were to setup a working democratic moderated forum and Tim M. did a fantastic job rewarding all the features the founder group wanted. About a year when we noticed everything was running smoothly the founder group decided they were no longer needed and dissolved itself.

Thanks for clarification. So the founders did not own the domain, the software, and made no deal about the content, just how to run the ommunity.

Exactly.

There is imo little to discuss regarding ownership.

There is indeed no discussion who owns the domain, that's chessusa. I am not so sure about the ownership of the data.

[hgm]

Well, the postings are obviously an expression of human creativity. So the international laws for intellectual property apply to those, which means they are subject to copyrights. As the conditions one has to agree with for registring toTalkChess do not involve any transfer of copyrights, this means the copyrights still resides with the authors of those postings. They granted a license to 'TalkChess.com' for 'storing the postings in a database', though.

What the latter legally means is a bit unclear, as TalkChess.com is not a legal entity. My best guess is that it would be interpreted as that the postings can be stored in a database that can be accessed only through a message board calling itself TalkChess.com. It doesn't seem to put a restriction on where such a board can be hosted.

Also note that the situation w.r.t. the software has changed quite a bit: the boarhd is now running as the combination of standard bulletin-board software (phpBB), plus dedicated chess enhancements written by me, partly running on the ChessUSA server (the phpBB part), and partly on my own server (the chess enhancements and data-repair of postings from before the upgrade).

Another point worth noting is that the current board only holds postings from 2007 and later (i.e. from the phpBB era).

[mclane]

...

Whatever your issues were in the past, whatever you are projecting now onto whomever, it does not help the current situation (and it did not help in the CTF case btw.). Try to be a part of the solution, fix your mistakes as founder from the past. The founders handed over the domain and forum to a company, without any written contract? The new owner who bought that company claims ownership, well, he hosted that domain and forum for ~10 years, right?

This is a misunderstanding. Talkchess.com always belonged to chess.usa. At the time (1997) there was no such forum software as phpBB and Tim M. from chessusa literally wrote one. And so we could talk. The efforts and responsibilities of the founder-group were to setup a working democratic moderated forum and Tim M. did a fantastic job rewarding all the features the founder group wanted. About a year when we noticed everything was running smoothly the founder group decided they were no longer needed and dissolved itself.

Thanks for clarification. So the founders did not own the domain, the software, and made no deal about the content, just how to run the ommunity.

Exactly.

There is imo little to discuss regarding ownership.

There is indeed no discussion who owns the domain, that's chessusa. I am not so sure about the ownership of the data.

As HGM also said, the data was contributed by the computerchess community over many years and it belongs to them.
Nobody other then the writers have the property about the texts.

The domain name is and never was important.
If you call it talkchess or CCC or whatever name is unimportant. It is THE most important Forum about computerchess we have.

I guess it also has the most traffic of all computerchess forums.

[hgm]

I think you are wrong about the domain name. Even if the forum at talkchess.com was totally crap (as it pretty much already is), and we would have a technically perfect forum with lots of cool features, people would still be coming here, and the other forum would remain practically empty.

Talking about cool features:

Wouldn't it be nice to have a life broadcasting feature in the forum? So that in the Tournament & Matches section the testers could already create a thread for their tourneys when they start them, rather than just report results afterwards. And people could watch the games in real time.

[chrisw]

...

Whatever your issues were in the past, whatever you are projecting now onto whomever, it does not help the current situation (and it did not help in the CTF case btw.). Try to be a part of the solution, fix your mistakes as founder from the past. The founders handed over the domain and forum to a company, without any written contract? The new owner who bought that company claims ownership, well, he hosted that domain and forum for ~10 years, right?

This is a misunderstanding. Talkchess.com always belonged to chess.usa. At the time (1997) there was no such forum software as phpBB and Tim M. from chessusa literally wrote one. And so we could talk. The efforts and responsibilities of the founder-group were to setup a working democratic moderated forum and Tim M. did a fantastic job rewarding all the features the founder group wanted. About a year when we noticed everything was running smoothly the founder group decided they were no longer needed and dissolved itself.

Thanks for clarification. So the founders did not own the domain, the software, and made no deal about the content, just how to run the ommunity.

Exactly.

BS. Not exactly at all.

There was a contract between the original “founders” and S. Schwartz of ICD which governed what ICD was and was not allowed to do in order to be allowed to host the forum. I wrote the contract.

This forum was a major catch and a major asset for ICD in 1997 when it was started. There were several companies and individuals competing in the chess web space at that time. ICD got dominance because of this forum. There were multiple shenanigans involved around the possession of the forum onto the ICD server. Multiple deceptions.

The idea of a “Computer Chess Club” forum was around between SOME of the “founders” way before ICD got to hear about it and there’s no way ICD can claim to own it. They don’t and nor do their successors. ICD were granted hosting rights only, subject to a bunch of conditions that they then rode a coach and horses through. ICD are in multiple breach if those conditions and they (again) used a bunch of shenanigans to enable them to get away with it.

There is imo little to discuss regarding ownership.

There is indeed no discussion who owns the domain, that's chessusa. I am not so sure about the ownership of the data.