Intellectual Property Law

Scrabu-loss

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

This week many Facebook users in North America -- including myself -- are mourning the loss of Scrabulous, one of the most popular applications on the social network site, which brought hundreds of thousands of younger players to the online version of the traditional board game Scrabble for virtuoso displays of vocabulary and recombinant improvisation of letters. I was in the middle of a heated game with my university's head of special collections and archives when very abruptly the plug was pulled on copyright grounds. For months, Scrabulous players were enjoying the game on borrowed time because of an ongoing legal battle over ownership of intellectual property because Hasbro, the owner of the corporate trademark and producer of the analogous physical game, saw the appropriation of the rules of their game in an online environment by Scrabulous creators Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla as an act of infringement. According to "Makers of Scrabble try to shut down online version" in The Los Angeles Times, this action has been in the offing since at least January of this year.

Unfortunately, as The New York Times explained in April, the legitimate corporate-developed version seems far inferior to most users. NPR tells more about the problems with the official software developed by Electronic Arts and about user revolts taking place all over the web here.

Of course, it has been a tough year of board game litigiousness. The most bizarre case may be the one faced by NYU professor Alex Galloway, who was challenged by the widow of French Situationist Guy Debord in a battle over the rights to the free online game Kriegspiel.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).