There is no doubt that Hasbro owns the IP on Scrabble, and are within their rights to force Scrabulous off Facebook, but legal rights don’t always make things right. If I ever create something worth loadsamoney, I would like my childern and probably grandchildren to enjoy some of the windfall, but I’m not impressed with the way suits who’ve never invented anything use IP law to make money out of other peoples ideas.
Scrabble was developed in its current form between by two guys called Alfred Butts and James Brunot; and Brunot lost money bringing it into production. Since 1948, no one has actually done anything to add more intellectual property to the basic mechanics; and the graphic designs since then haven’t added much either. Butts an Brunot thave long since sold off rights, and I doubt if they are still getting money out of the game – and they are certainly not getting as much as Hasbro is.
Copyright law is supposed to foster progress and innovation, and what the programmers of Scrabulous did was certainly more progressive than anything anyone else has done with Scrabble since 1948 – they deserve recognition and a few bob for their efforts. I’m not sure they earned the right to be rich forever off it, but I do think that it would be good for the world if they earned enough to go off and tinker with stuff for a while and see if they cane come up with more good ideas. We don’t know why Hasbro failed to cut a deal with them, but like many others I’d be inclined to suspect a failure on the part of Hasbro.
Hasbro is not a company that is associated with innovation. They have accquired a great deal of IP rights to many successful products over time, and they do keep the games on the shelves, but most Hasbro boxes could be cheaper. There is a lot of innovation in game design going on out there, but most of it is happening in small companies, many working on a DTP model or the “pre-order 50 copies and we can print it model”. Hasbro’s own Scrabble client for Facebook is, in comparison with Scrabulous, so bad as to be not worth playing. Hasbro, really, is the Microsoft of gaming, squatting on top of the marketplace, more concerned with protecting shareholder value than with progressive innovation. Like any large organisation, it is a bog that money soaks into, rather than a stream of progress.
Hasbro, Mircosoft, Big Pharma, the music industry, Hollywood and others are all able to maintain market dominance partly through intellectual property laws that do really need to be looked at again and reviewed to protect the original inventors, allow companies to make some money out of bringing a product to market but limit the transferability and duration of IP “rights”. Lawyers don’t actually make anything, so they shouldn’t make so much money.
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