Free Chess Database

It is also possible within the parameters of the words of the op, that the question was about the ergonomics of the software handling the databases. Possibly, one could review all the new updates of the free (open or not) software versions out there, to see if they keep improving like I assume chessbase (which i have only a vague experience of, confusing with fritz perhaps) does.

I don't mean going ribbon though.

Of course you can. Like the caissabase I linked previously. It is chess database with excess of 5 million games. If you really want you can distribute, append new games into it append more games into it. I really see no point of it except perhaps maintaining backup copy just in case maintainer stops distributing it.

And the database program: there are several free ones. if you don't like features of those contributing for features you thing are necessary. By no means easy task given that they do have all basic features already.

@Riffecs said in #12:
> That's the point. Would I be allowed to create a database myself?

Yes.

> I could distribute this like ChessBase?

Yes....

But you have to be careful how you source your data. You may be on thin ice of you just copy a collection made by someone else. You may want to consult a lawyer before starting this endeavour.

I tend to suspect Lichess strips off all the tags when a game is 'imported' to protect itself from some kind of liability ... who 'owns' the text of some given game ? There must be some kind of legal issues involved ... like, does the author of commentary included in the text of that game's pgn, does that author hold implicit copyright to said commentary text ?

And to descend that particular rabbit hole a little further ... since nobody condones plagiarism, if a game appeared originally, say, in the Boston Globe newspaper, and that game is later incorporated into a database eventually put up for sale, wouldn't the Boston Globe be entitled to some degree of royalty on all sales of said database ?

@boilingFrog Nope, this was discussed earlier in the thread. Mere facts are not under protection of copyright laws. When game was played, by whom, what moves were made etc. are definitely mere facts. It does not matter where information was retrieved for those. Annotations are clearly "creative work" and hence fall under copyright laws and so the aspiring database maintainer should strip those.

Inside EU there is database directive which gives some protection to databases created inside EU. So extracting all the games from chessbase and making verbatim copy of that might lead to legal problems. Chessbase is a EU company so they have this protection. But problem is that in legal dispute they would have provide sufficient evidence that games were extracted and not harvested from elsewhere. But there is no need such a thing as there are free volunteer maintained databases . Like caissabase with sufficient sample of games for any research and being expanded with games extracted by new games from "The Week in Chess" periodically.

My comments were about database collating decision standards. Read any of the blobs explaining the databases available online, and you would never be able to reproduce the database from same raw data sources. Indicating wild west context since in effect. ooops, a slip of the mind. I meant there is a lot of room for many individuals to start creating curation standards (curation implying collation too here). So agreements between communities. perhaps even take the habit to provide the verbatim raw sources, the curated database, and the database of the rejects. or whatever is discarded or modified.

Perhaps individuals doing the work could then refer to such standards, and their blobs would keep same size or amount of writing work (seems like explaining what one does is really hard, it is).

Others have mentioned caissabase, which has currently (last update 2022-01-08) 5.61 million games, and is free to download. You will find most of the high level games. It contains games with at least one of the players 2000 rated. If you want a very high quality, well curated, free database, there is http://40hchess.epizy.com/ It has 4 files - gm1830.pgn, gm1931.pgn, gm1981.pgn (games played from 1981 to 2015, both players at least 2400), gm2016.pgn (games were played from 2016 to 2022, both players at least 2450). The site also has nearly 100 software tools for processing game collections, epd files. Also has epd files of mate in 2 to mate in 8 puzzles. The files were last updated on 2022-02-20, and are updates every few months.

@Riffecs said in #1:
> Why is there no free game database in the chess world that comes close to ChessBase. Lichess database is free but not really free. For example, it is not possible to download it to use it offline.

I didn't know about the database you mention so I went and checked it out. The interface looks nice but every feature is behind a paywall.

Then I went to database.lichess.org/.
If you read the whole page you will see that instructions are provided on how to download and use the data offline. Every rated game played on lichess is there in PGN format. The database itself is under a free license : CC0.

The only downside of Lichess' database is that you have to do the work yourself: there is no easy interface, but you can analyze the data with free tools. Knowing a bit of programming helps.

i use www.pgnmentor.com/files.html and load it into scid.. its all i really need right now