Plagiarism and Related Crimes

Chess writers are notoriously lax with documentation. Many books contain none at all. Some highly regarded instructional manuals use positions from historic games, but do not name the players who produced the position through play. Knowing that Jose Capablanca won a particular endgame is not necessary to learn how a specific position that he played should be played. Even so, offering that information improves the instructional value by hinting at a direction for further study. Here, I am thinking of Jeremy Silman, Silman's Complete Endgame Course (2007), 294-296.

Garry Kasparov, My Great Predecessors, 5 vols. (2003-2006) serves as a terrific anthology of analysis of great games throughout chess history. Early volumes were criticized for poor documentation. Kasparov responded by including a partial bibliography at the end of volume 5. This reference list fails to address the sloppy practice of offering no more than a surname for most quotes from prior works, but at least acknowledges part of the problem in the early volumes.

Edward Winter has exposed many cases of lax sourcing as well as several of explicit plagiarism. See Chess Notes (search for plagiarism). Among the consequences of indiscriminate copying that he notes is the perpetuation of error. When one writer gets a date, location, players, or game score wrong, others will follow. It is the same with chess quotes. I'm tempted to speculate that fake chess quotes could be more frequent among chess enthusiasts than among politicians.

Chess Skills has previously noted errors in the history from which we get the name Pillsbury's Mate. Nonetheless, I often recommend Georges Renaud and Victor Kahn, The Art of the Checkmate (1953) for its pedagogical value despite sloppy sourcing (the Pillsbury Mate error may originate with the authors). Irving Chernev, The 1000 Best Short Games of Chess (1955) was instrumental in my growth as a chess player, but I criticized its sloppy history in my Amazon review of the book. Some readers have criticized my review.

For most chess players, instructive value is all that matters. Who cares if sources are cited? Who cares whether games are properly referenced? 

Social Media

Everything is free on the internet. Content creators find their work presented by others with no reference to who created it. Someone creates a puzzle from a game they are reviewing, but others have created the same puzzle from the same game before. Does it matter where you found it? Go ahead and share as if you were the one reading the book. 

A Facebook group that offers dozens of puzzles most days featured a puzzle from a game I was reviewing that morning. I shared it to the page. My post was presented under the name of the group’s administrator.

Two hours later, my original post was approved, placing that puzzle twice in that group’s feed. When I suggested that the administrator should have noted his source, we engaged in a heated discussion. He even claimed to have added the source information to the puzzle, although it is obvious that he copied and pasted. Note the proper use of a dash where 99.9% of everyone places a hyphen.* He even copied a typo in the book’s date of publication, which should be 1955. Copying replicates errors.

A few days later, he removed me from the group.

Several weeks earlier, I shared a different puzzle from an earlier game in the same book. I used a screenshot from chessgames.com to present the position and the names of the players. I did not mention chessgames.com. A comment accused me of plagiarism. I edited the post after some discussion with the accuser. Although I did not view sharing a screenshot from another site as plagiarism, providing a reference to chessgames.com did seem appropriate.

Some people care. Things on the internet are still protected by copyright.

*A hyphen is a unit of spelling. A dash is a unit of grammar. Adversaries in a contest should be separated by a dash. Such usage is extremely rare. Even so, my 99.9% is hyperbole.