From: Andrew Okun <aokun <at> GLOWWORMPUB <dot> COM>

Subject: Re: Copyright of game score

If, as suggested by the other replies so far and in accord with common
sense, game scores themselves are not copyrightable, there are still two
things to watch out for.  One, annotations and commentary are
copyrightable, so would have to be stripped out if they were there
before reproducing a game record.  Second, a collection of games could
be copyrightable.  In other contexts, lists of things, each of which is
not copyrightable, have been found to have been the result of sufficient
(even if minimal) creative effort to warrant copyright protection.
Thus, if one person collected and published a volume of "The 100 Best
Games Ever," you might not be able to copy the whole collection
verbatim, even though you could copy any individual game or assemble
your own list.

These principles were illustrated in case called Urantia Foundation v.
Maahera, I think, in which a desciple reproduced the entire sacred text
of a religion as part of a study guide.  The foundation that operated
the religion sued and won, even though both sides agreed (and the court
was constrained to go along with) that the underlying text was authored
by Celestial Beings and then transmitted to Earth through a patient of a
certain psychiatrist in Chicago.  Had the defendant quoted parts of the
book, it would have been fine, but the overall arrangement and editing
was sufficiently creative to give the book as a unit protection.  The
case cited an earlier decision in which a monk published a book of
things God had told him then sued someone for quoting from it.  He lost,
having not asserted copyright in the text, only in the book as a whole.

Andy