Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone has a suggestion for a good program that I could use to compile problems in order to be able to print them. I'd really like to collect a lot of problems from Go World articles, in one place that I can print/bind, and sit down and work through them. It would be really nice to have options on how they are arranged on the page, how much of the board is shown, numbering for solutions etc.

As an aside; it's a bit of a shame that we in the west refer mostly to the game as "go", as it makes it very difficult to get meaningful results when searching the internet!


All the best,

Zac

GoWrite is often used for publications. Do you know this program?
See http://gowrite.net/GOWrite2_download.html

Thanks for the reply,

I will have a look at the program tonight and see how I go with it.
On a related note; is it generally accepted that go problems without solutions can be freely distributed? I'm planning to include the solutions for my personal use (as I own the Go World issues), but wondering about distributing just the problems for other people to use?


Thanks again,

Zac

I had a bit of a play around with gowrite this afternoon. It looks like a good tool but I'm struggling to understand how to make many small, corner/side only diagrams, without having to manually select each corner and export each image individually. If anyone has used this program and can give me some sort of guide on how to make small diagrams, and print many to a page, it would be greatly appreciated.

Zac

You could also take the easy option of using a pdf of problems already made, tasuki has a nice collection.
https://tsumego.tasuki.org

Thanks for link. I think I have these saved on my computer. Generally I prefer to have solutions to problems available, I look at problems as achieving one of two aims, or both: improve raw reading skill,in which case solutions are not as important, or to learn a new technique, which may come from problems without solutions but not always. Sometimes I need the move pointed out, because I may have misread a particular reply etc. I'm not really strong enough to always read out every move correctly.

Really I don't need more problems. I am coming back from a long break I'm working back through some old favourites, GGPB, 1001 L&D, the Yi Changho books, GSAT and others. It should keep me going for quite a while.

I was browsing through Go World and there seems to be quite a few good problem sets, and more than anything else it seemed like a fun project to work on to collect them all.

Incidentally that site does memtion how he compiled the problems.


All the best,
Zac

No, this is not generally accepted. It is an open discussion, and AFAIK nobody has ever tested it in court. Different laws in different countries may also give different answers to this question.

I think, generally, the following holds:

1. Game records are simple recording of fact of an event, and are probably not copyrightable (pro organisation do often claim copyright though). Even though there is creative work being done by the players, others might very easily make the same moves based on the same tactical thinking. (Compare reporting the result of a football match, i.e. who scored when and what the final result was, without further audio, video or commentary)

2. Video, audio, pictures or written description (e.g. a newspaper article) of a game are definitely copyrightable.

3. Go problems are creative work, and are probably copyrightable. Many go problems come from older sources and it is often very hard to say how old they are and who the original composer is, so even if they can be copyrighted, that copyright may have expired. The counter-argument is that problem position might arise from play (many have, in fact) and as such would not be copyrightable by the above "recording of fact" argument.

4. Commentary on either game records or problems (including solution/failure variations) are definitely copyrightable

5. A collection of go problems is probably copyrightable, as long as the author did creative work in choosing a theme or level for the collection, or chose a specific order to present problems.

If you mix problems from different sources, without keeping them in the original order or grouped by the original theme, and without solution/failure variations or commentary, you are probably not violating copyright.

Very nice summary, thank you.
Your last sentence , quoted above, does not seem correct to me.
A partial copy can also be a copyright infringement, if I'm not mistaken.

I said "you are probably not infringing", maybe I should have said "you might not be infringing". This hinges in whether the source problems are from older sources or from games, and on whether individual problems are indeed copyrightable.

So my suggested approach removes all definite copyright infringement (comments, solutions, same collection & order/theme/grouping) and leaves only the remaining (hard) question of whether the resulting collection actually contains any individually copyrighted problems.

Seems like I should probably do the safe thing, and only make booklets for personal use. I still haven't worked out GoWrite, other than to export individual images and then use some other program to do layout. It's just too time consuming, and I imagine there must be a better way.
If I say Robert Jasieks name three times, will he appear and tell me what program he used to layout his books? Or John Fairbairn perhaps?


All the best,

Zac