On Mar 26, 7:24 am, Jürgen R. wrote:
"Carl" schrieb im ...



On Mar 25, 7:47 pm, David Babcock wrote:
the Harkness book is one of the very first books to introduce
the "Goren Standard American" system of bidding. The system under
which Ace = 4, King = 3, Queen = 2 and Jack = 1 is introduced on page
72 of the Harkness Book.

From Milton's Work's _Contract Bridge_ (1927):

"Reckon an Ace as 4, a King as 3, a Queen as 2, and a Jack as 1." (p.
28).

On a related matter, I have spoken with Amazon about the
misattribution of the authorship of the Harkness reprint to Goren in
the listing on their site; their customer support representative
appreciated the information, repeated everything back to me (at his
suggestion), and said he is forwarding the information to a
supervisor. Perhaps Mr. Sloan's hope that the error will be corrected
is just a bit closer to realization.

David

Amazon Customer Support is the galactic opposite of eBay. They
actually listen and then act on the information. I manage several
forums, of which one is for book sellers. 99% of the members speak
well of Amazon.

This may be so; however, even for Amazon it isn't a simple matter to
determine
who owns a Copyright. Sloan seems to be selecting books that might either be
in the public domain or under Copyright that isn't likely to be defended.

The grossest error he has made so far is to copy a book by G.M. Kasparyan
(Domination in 2545 Endgame Studies). This is an important book that went
through several editions in Russia. Kasparyan died in 1995, so the Copyright
cannot have expired. The English translation was published by 'Progress',
which didn't survive the ravages of Capitalism. Most likely one or another
of the Oligarchs holds the rights to the book lists of Progress and Mir,
the foreign language publishers in the days of the Soviets; and sooner or
later they will realize that these are valuable.

The Kasparyan book was published in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union
did not honor international copyright law and pirated many, many books
published in the West. An example is "My 60 Memorable Games" by Bobby
Fischer.

Since the Soviet Union did not recognize our copyrights, we do not
recognize their's.

Also, the Kasparyan book was itself a copyright violation. Kasparyan
himself composed only a few of the problems in the book. The rest were
created by other composers. For example, the Kasparyan book cites "365
Selected Chess Endgames" by Norman T. Whitaker. Whitaker was an
American. I knew him well. (Nothing to do with the Lindbergh
kidnapping though.)

I have reprinted both the Whitaker book and the Kasparyan book. See:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891846

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891870

Somebody on this group, it may have been Jürgen R. himself, contacted
the Russian State Press when my reprint of the Kasparyan book came out
last year, and reported back here that they have no rights to and no
interest in the Kasparyan book.

Sam Sloan