Posts : 2608 Join date : 2020-11-17 Location : Netherlands
Subject: Stockfish vs Chessbase Thu Jun 23, 2022 11:15 am
2022-06-22 Public court hearing soon!
As announced nearly one year ago, leading Stockfish developers have filed suit against ChessBase to enforce their license termination after repeated copyright violation by ChessBase. The court hearing in the case Tord Romstad and Stéphane Nicolet vs. ChessBase GmbH will take place soon.
In recent months, we have presented to the court detailed evidence that the ChessBase products Houdini 6 and Fat Fritz 2 have copied extensive parts of the Stockfish code base authored by the plaintiffs and that ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPLv3 license. GPLv3 requires that the user is informed of their rights, has access to the corresponding sources, and has the right to reproduce, modify and distribute GPLed programs royalty-free.
We have applied to the court to order ChessBase to cease distributing Stockfish in all forms, including Fat Fritz 2 and Houdini 6, as the GPLv3 license has been terminated permanently according to section 8, and to cover our legal expenses.
The hearing is scheduled to take place on Monday, July 4th, 2022, 11am in Munich (Germany):
Landgericht München I Sitzungssaal 101, 1. Stock, Lenbachplatz 7 D-80316 München
We inform interested parties that the public is permitted to attend and will update on the progress made.
next hearing date in this matter is in March 2023....
Vondele (SF-Team):
"Hi guys, just a short debrief of our (Stéphane, Till, myself) meeting here. I think generally we're quite happy about how it went. The judge was very knowledgable and understood our arguments and evidence pretty well. The burden of proof has been reversed for Houdini (IIUC), and we understand that termination by few copyright holders is possible. The scope of termination is something that needs further work (which versions, which code, etc). The alternative would be to settle, with terms that we need to reflect on, and in particular also discuss with Tord. It has been very nice to meet a few of you in person, that was definitely the most enjoyable aspect of these days! We will be getting a report from Till and take some time to reflect. A next brief is due in September, while a next hearing is scheduled for March 2023."
adminx, Damir Desevac and Ipmanchess like this post
this PR is being made from court. Today, Tord and Stéphane, with broad support of the developer community are defending their complaint, filed in Munich, against ChessBase. With their products Houdini 6 and Fat Fritz 2, both Stockfish derivatives, ChessBase violated repeatedly the Stockfish GPLv3 license. Tord and Stéphane have terminated their license with ChessBase permanently. Today we have the opportunity to present our evidence to the judge and enforce that termination. To read up, have a look at our blog post https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/public-court-hearing-soon/ and https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-chessbase/
This PR introduces a net trained with an enhanced data set and a modified loss function in the trainer. A slight adjustment for the scaling was needed to get a pass on standard chess.
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