Re: He's done it again. 2/2

Matt979 · Mon, 04 Dec 2000 13:09:57 -0800

Disclaimers: I have a law degree but I'm not a
lawyer[1] & am not offering legal advice. I am a member of
National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC, which competes
with Questions Unlimited et al in the high school
market, but I speak for myself alone. I played in several
Chip Beall events in high school (1989-92) and
happened to enjoy them[2].

qbjef asks:
"Whose
name should the copyright be in - the team's, the
school's, the club's, or each contributing
member's?"

Short answer: The club that hosts the
tournament.

About four years ago there was a copyright discussion
in the context of tournament hosts selling or
trading their questions. If Chris Morse (Vandy, then UVa)
or Pat Matthews is still around, they could explain
more.

Basically, for a short time, tournament hosts allowed that
the teams submitting the questions might hold the
copyright to them, and offered entry fee discounts ($10-15
range) for waiving any potential copyright
claims.

This was a mutually agreeable solution to some
controversy involving teams that would acquire a set of
questions, then trade that same set without permission. Then
for some reason the practice died out. I suppose TD's
simply became more confident that they did, in fact,
have sufficient copyright claim to stop the
third-party trading.

(I suspect what actually stopped
the third-party trading was that the QB community
found out about it and expressed its disapproval. The
legal issues remained unclear but the code of etiquette
became universally observed.)

The customary
understanding seems to be that the host club (maybe the TD? the
chief pack editor?) has the right to deal with the
questions as it sees fit. Tradition is to sell or trade
your own tournament's questions to the extent that you
can, then post them to the archive after one
year.

Legally, it's not clear to me what the effect is of
posting questions to an archive. (Ethically, it's clear
enough.) Looking forward, people who host archives could
(probably should) post a reminder that the people who sent
questions to the archive retain their rights. ("All rights
reserved, not for commercial use,"
maybe.)

Matt
[1] TDing an event three days before the bar exam is
unwise.

[2] Many complaints about QU seem irrelevant to
whether anyone committed plagiarism. Evidence of other
misdeeds would matter, but accusations alone don't help.
Comments about question quality seem to be beside the
point.

As a critic (with an obvious bias), I'm a bit
surprised that people pay so much for QU and NAC products,
but in this country, there's nothing wrong with
profit maximizing.