No dog in this fight

[womzilla]

I am not a Facebook user; I am not a player of Scrabble or Scrabulous; and generally I'm not very excitable about trademark violations.

However, I have to point to this this comment from the BBC's article on the Scrabulous affair. (Background: Hasbro and Mattel, who split the worldwide ownership of Scrabble between them, are requesting that Facebook take down Scrabulous, which is a precise clone of the board game and physically resembles it to a degree that it's a clear trademark violation. There's a good screenshot of Scrabulous in this ABC article. Games--the rules of games--aren't covered by copyright, but their components can be, and they certainly can be protected by trademark. On the face of it, Hasbro and Mattel--which can agree on nothing else--are almost certainly well within their rights to do this.)

The comment was this:

Interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live Karl Savage, a member of the Save Scrabulous group, said: "A lot of people are saying shame on Hasbro, shame on Mattel, if you wouldn't be so short-sighted about this then you have an opportunity to actually make some money from this rather than alienate your existing customers. . . ."

Well, yes, except for the fact that neither Hasbro nor Mattel controls the online rights to Scrabble. The world's largest computer game manufacturer, Electronic Arts, does, at least for the next few years--they apparently picked them up from Infogrames/Atari after Hasbro renegotiated the sale of Hasbro Interactive to Infogrames in 2001.

Yes, this is a tangled thicket of rights and reassignments. But you'd think that a) someone who is deeply interested in the online version of Scrabble might want to do a smidgen of research before telling reasonably successful multinational corporations how to run their businesses, and b) that the BBC reporter covering the matter might take the time to find out if the person interviewed has even the slightest sense of what he's talking about before quoting him.

Comments

[redbird]

On the other hand, it's not unreasonable for a player guess that the company that's claiming trademark violation is the one that owns the relevant rights; yes, the reporter should have done more research, either to verify that or find out why Electronic Arts isn't involved here, but I don't fault the random person interviewed. Did EA pick up online rights to the game but not the images of the board and tiles? (Not impossible, but it seems odd.)

Also, some of the ordinary player comments I've seen have been more "I started playing online, and liked it enough that I went out and bought a Scrabble set." No way to know how many such there are--or how many of the people playing on Facebook already own multiple physical Scrabble sets. I might be willing to pay to play online; I don't need a fourth physical Scrabble set, and won't whether or not I can play on Facebook.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Oh, the idea that someone should simply re-license Scrabulous seems perfectly reasonable. But you'd think someone who is a prominent enough member of the "Save Scrabulous" community to get interviewed for Radio 5 would have read enough commentary on the issue to know that Hasbro & Mattel don't have the option he's blythly asserting is the best choices for them.

[avram]

But you'd think someone who is a prominent enough member of the "Save Scrabulous" community to get interviewed for Radio 5

But how prominent is that, really? It may just be that this guy turned up high in a Google search, or maybe he's a friend of a friend of the journo's.

A couple years back, when I lived in Jersey City, there was one of those budgetary messes that caused the city to shut down its offices for a day. (Or maybe it was a labor action? I've forgotten.) I was sitting in my local coffee shop when a journalist came in and asked me if I was a city employee and interested in being interviewed about the shut-down.

I figure a lot of people who get interviewed don't actually have much expertise in the subject in question. They're just a convenient representative of One Side, so the journalist can check off one of the "get both sides" checkboxes.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

That is, in fact, my complaint: why is reporting so shoddy that they're interviewing people with no knowledge for their opinions on factual matters?

[nppyinzer.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I have several friends who work at EA, one of whom recently thrashed me soundly at Scrabulous. Through them, I have heard that EA suing somebody over Scrabulous is likely.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Frankly, if I were the makers of Scrabulous, I'd do a quick revision of the component graphics, change the title, and tell Hasbro, Mattel, and EA all to go piss up a fiber optic cable.