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"Please God, I Have So Little: Don?t Take Scrabulous Too."

By Ann Althouse

That's the name of a Facebook group, mentioned in this NYT article about what is a difficult problem for the Hasbro and Mattel, which own the rights to the board game Scrabble. Scrabulous plainly rips off Scrabble, so the companies could use the law to crush Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who created Scrabulous (and make $25,000 a month on advertising). But the Agarwallas have made Scrabble popular among huge numbers of young people, and they are now: 1. motivated to buy the board game, and 2. primed to hate any bad corporations that take away their fun.

?If you?re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn?t in your interest to shut this down,? said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of ?The Pirate?s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.?

The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. ?If something?s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,? he said.

Full post as published by Althouse on March 02, 2008 (boomark / email).