“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.
March 2, 2008
"Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too."
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.
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6 comments:
The game company needs to be carefull here. They could ignore the web site, or try to shut them down for trademark infringement. I think there is a better, third way: They should try and make a deal with the website where for some nominal fee, they become authorized to use the Scrabble name. The important thing is that if they allow infringement to take place, then they could weaken their trademark.
Maybe instead of a fee, they could ask for 5 or 10% of the advertising space...
"Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game."
They do not want to shut it down but they do not want their franchise hurt either, especially since they are coming out with their own online game soon.
The point that they should just accept the fact that technology makes things inevitable and they should just go along with it is ludicrous. This would open up the door for anyone to steal content people pay for and make it available for free or for advertising profit.
Eventually, some group, corporation, or person is going to have to draw a line in the sand and say enough.
I don't know about Mattel, which is a separate company, but Hasbro's behavior regarding other matters does not make me sanguine regarding this incident.
Back in the late 1990s Federal court in a case involving TSR Inc. (plaintiff) and Game Designer's Workshop and Omega Helios (defendents) ruled that game mechanics (rules that is) could not be copyrighted in and of themselves. This ruling was later used as part of the basis for the Open Game License introduced with the Dungeons & Dragons third edition game published by Wizards of the Coast, who had purchased TSR Inc. when that company collapsed. The OGL being also based in large part on the Open Source License in software, and Creative Commons.
Then Hasbro purchased Wizards, and they've been working hard to put things back the way they were before. The upcoming 4th edition of D&D has a more restrictive OGL associated with it, and further limitations are expected as the publication date comes nearer.
I don't know about the trademark or tradedress issues, but I do know Hasbro hasn't a leg to stand on when it comes to mechanics or elements of play. Scrabble is a tile game, and there are numerous tile games out on the market. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with different word tile games either.
Hasbro (and middle class guy) forget that it's not the product, but the community that matters. There's a reason why Nabisco offers coupons for Oreo Cookies; you get a taste cheap there's a better chance you'll pay the regular price later than if you never had the chance to buy the cookies at an intro rate. Hydrox was once a serious competitor to Oreos, now the brand has disappeared. Why? Because the manufacturer stopped promoting the cookie agressively and offering special deals. Oreos are still around, Hydrox has softly, silently vanished away.
Author John Scalzi and his publisher, Tor very recently made his novel, Old Man's War available as an ebook for free. John has blogged on this, and revealed that sales of Old Man's War have actually increased. Baen Books has been offering free ebook editions of a number of their titles for years now. Eric Flint's Mother of Demons was brought back into print thanks to the demand for a print edition created by the free electronic book.
The goal of any producer is not to control the supply, but to create demand. Better a short time loss that leads to long term gains, than long term losses. Tor and Baen have lost some book sales, but not as many as you'd think, and in the long run have picked up sales they were not likely to have gained any other way.
That's what counts, getting your name out there, creating a demand for your product. Storage costs money and you want product going out as often as possible. Better to give away one out of every 10 word tile game that leaves the warehouse than to have all those games sit, gather dust, and eat up your budget.
They'd be smarter to sue for a cut of the revenues. A large one.
Garrison Keillor does a great Scrabble (TM)-cheatin' cowboys routine....
Why looky there! I just happened to draw seven letters that spell zeppelin.
Mythusmage's understanding matches mine: You can't protect game mechanics--any more than you could protect story mechanics.
"What? Your story is about of star-crossed lovers from warring families?"
Games have a long history of being ripped off, video games in particular. Scrabble's mechanics were derivative of many games that came before.
I don't see, frankly, how they could shut it down except by legal intimidation (and $25K a month should help defray that intimidation). I could see them insisting on a name change, but that would probably only help the "Scrabulous" guys, who are already established, while preventing anyone else from inventing "Skrabl" or "Scraptacular" or whatever.
But then, IANAL.
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