Copyright
Disclaimer: This article does not constitute legal advice. Please consult a lawyer for questions concerning the law.
Controversial assertions about copyright have intersected with quizbowl on several occasions.
Game formats
College Bowl claims to hold a copyright on the tossup/bonus game format, and Questions Unlimited claims to hold a copyright on the four-quarter game format.
It is a well-established principle of law that game formats cannot be copyrighted. Attempts to get College Bowl or, to a lesser extent, QU to produce any evidence that these copyrights actually exist have thusfar proven fruitless.
Prior to 2008, College Bowl demanded that anyone hosting a tossup/bonus format tournament pay a nominal $1 fee to the College Bowl corporation to acknowledge the "licensure" of its game format. In practice, after approximately 1988 there were no consequences for College Bowl participants who failed to license their hosted tournaments under this scheme, and the only difference between tournaments which paid the fee and those which did not was that fee-payers had their events promoted by College Bowl.
College Bowl has occasionally made general threats through the media to the end of somehow "suing" NAQT or other groups which run tossup/bonus tournaments. No such legal action was ever actually pursued.
QU has not been known to threaten any particular organizations or hosts that use the four-quarter format.
Question packets
College Bowl's rules required that all question packets be destroyed within five years of receipt[1]. Many packets, from NAQT and other organizations, contain notices stating that redistribution is prohibited. It has not been established by any actual legal case whether the retention or sale of physical packets, without unauthorized duplication, can actually be prohibited under the first sale doctrine.
Copyright on question content, in general
As a general principle of copyright law in the U.S. and most other countries, the content of any creative work is automatically copyrighted as soon as it is created. No further registration or documentation is needed. The unauthorized resale of question content (e.g., plagiarism) is in theory legally actionable.