Well, here are my several cents… "1) Who own the reproduction rights to written questions, if anyone? Particularly, to events in which each team is required to submit a packet of questions? Are questions copyrighted?" Questions, whoever wrote them, are copyright protected. The old rule was that the copyright needed to be registered and that there needed to be a notice on the text saying they were protected by copyright. Since the ratification of the Berne Convention, those formality requirements have been abolished. The above formalities would be required to initiate a lawsuit for copyright infringement, but those may be undertaken at any time, including after any alleged infringement takes place. It is important to remember that the actual facts in the questions are mere ideas rather than expression and are not copyrightable. No person or company can "own" the right to say that Topeka is the capital of Kansas. The bar for what constitutes expression is very low, but courts have ruled specifically that a mere list of names as in a phone book is not expression and that a list of results of sporting events is not expression. (Another thing. "Formats" are not copyrightable. This comes up a good deal in academic competition, since College Bowl Company, Inc. has at times asserted that other academic competition entities are violating their copyright by running tournaments with rules they deem too similar to theirs or based on their ideas. Game systems have sometimes received _patent_ protection, but patent law is a whole different ballgame with a different set of standards.) It's never really been settled who owns reproduction rights to submitted questions to independent tournaments. Some tournaments have explicitly arranged to own questions upon submission for tournaments, others have not. In theory the author of each individual question owns said question until those rights are waived. In practice it has made little difference, but the standard practice of selling a tournament's questions for use in future internal practices, with the profits going to the tournament host, seems to indicate that most people have considered tournament hosts to take ownership of reproduction rights. In my many years of involvement in academic competition, I have never heard of any objections to this practice by the original question authors. "2) What, if any, penalties exist for plagiarism?" For a submission tournament, the plagiarist along with his or her team is disqualified from that tournament and is pilloried on community message boards, That doesn't sound like much, and, well, it's not. The quizbowl community hasn't developed an adequate penalty structure for plagiarism. However, the decentralized nature of circuit organization would make any enforcement mechanism highly problematic. A dominant thread running through the "law of quizbowl," such as it is, is that the quizbowl circuit operates on a shoestring budget. Central organizing authorities don't really exist, at least not at the college level. There are real liability issues (supervision of college students, etc.) that are never discussed, since acknowledging them might drive up costs to such a degree as to make the quizbowl circuit as we know it unsustainable. "3) Is there any sort of central authority that governs the validity or acceptability of questions?" In a word, no. Question writing organizations such as National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) have their own internal quality control mechanisms. The Academic Competition Federation (ACF), partially a question writing group and partially a submission editing group, do as well. But these organizations have no say as to the validity of questions outside of their own events. As for individual independent circuit events, no such authority exists except on a purely ad hoc basis. "4) Are there any legal issues with the use of copyrighted material within questions?" In theory, yes. In practice, not really. There are people who have been known to copy words verbatim from published sources for questions. They are infringing on copyright, but not to a degree that would be worth the trouble for anyone to go after. (There are of course statutory damages independent of economic loss for copyright infringement, but proving infringement would be problematic for any would-be plaintiff.) It's considered bad form to plagiarize, but from a practical perspective, the publisher of Benet's Readers' Encyclopedia isn't going to start suing QB players. (For one thing, this copying can't be said to deprive them of any economic benefit - if anything, QB players are encouraged to procure a Benet's by the knowledge that people write questions from it.) And of course, the structure of quizbowl questions is such that a question writer will in most cases have to shift words around. As for people ripping off previously written questions, this has been a problem in the past, and frankly, we haven't found a practical solution to it. Chip Beall of Questions Unlimited has allegedly raided our archives in the past and passed the old efforts of various quiz bowl writers as his own and profited commercially from them. (These questions are alleged to be generally unaltered form, which would argue against both independent creation and any application of the "fair use" doctrine.) This action would be clear- cut infringement, although it's still murky who the exact aggrieved party would be. It might serve quizbowl well to have some sort of clearinghouse, a nonprofit perhaps, that might be able to assert jurisdiction over this stuff. > 5) Are there any trademark issues involved with the use of school > names or the names of individuals? With regard to individuals, no trademark issues I know of. There are potential issues here with regards to school names, though most of them would apply to any student organization of any type. I'm not an education lawyer, so I'll use caution discussing this area of law. At the college level, all academic competition organizations I know of operate under the rubric of a university. Host schools of tournaments are required to comply with any relevant university regulations regarding trademarks and licensing, but as a practical matter these issues simply don't come up. The money involved is generally fairly low, what trademark policies exist that I know of are relatively easy to comply with (putting logos on recruiting posters or publicity materials, for instance) There is a trademark issue that does sometimes come up. It used to be common to refer to tournaments that employed the same rules as CB tournaments as "in the style of CBI." College Bowl then attempted to collect "licensing fees" for this practice. The first time they did so, the fees they proposed were prohibitively expensive for the programs involved. (Later attempts to collect licensing fees were of the "nominal consideration" variety, but they still had little success collection any money.) Host schools all balked ; some of them cancelled their tournaments, some of them changed their rules and stopped using the colloquial name "College Bowl" in any of their announcements. (It was at the time standard practice to refer to a school's quiz team as a "College Bowl team," and in part as a result of this series of events, quiz teams generally have names that do not refer to College Bowl in any way.) College Bowl, Inc. has tried to claim a good deal of intellectual property for itself, but has never to my knowledge acted on most of its assertions. At this date, no one questions their ownership of the name "College Bowl," their copyrights in their individual questions (indeed, most people in the quiz community dislike their questions) and the specific texts of their rules. CBCI has attempted to claim ownership of the "tossup-bonus" format, variations of which are employed by NAQT, ACF, and most other college-level academic competitions, and the terms "tossup" and "bonus" themselves. (In all fairness, it has now been some time since anyone at College Bowl has asserted such a broad claim.) "Format," as I said above, isn't the sort of thing one can copyright. It's possible to get a patent for something like this, but they haven't obtained one and this format now is a half-century old, and I'm fairly certain that any window they would have had to get a patent is gone. I hadn't heard of College Bowl ever trying the trademark route. The issue that I think would doom College Bowl to failure if they ever tried to go after NAQT or ACF for trademark infringement is that consumers in the relevant marketplace are easily able to distinguish their respective products in several ways. (The rules may not look terribly different to outsiders, but even novice players and game officials know the differences in the rules and procedures, the look and feel of the questions, and indeed the overall atmosphere.) No relevant party at an ACF or NAQT tournament could reasonably find themselves under the impression that College Bowl, Inc. had anything to do with the tournament. (And neither NAQT nor ACF would ever _want_ to create that kind of impression, either.) In short, there is no "likelihood of confusion."
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