Playing By the Letters of the Law

I'm really finding lame all the arguments the techlibs are putting up for enabling Scrabulous to go on stealing the copyright/trademark/whatever of Scrabble, a game owned by Hasbro and Mattel which has been around for 50 years. It's an emblematic case for the copyleft crowd, and a chance to flog Facebook, which frankly, for me, as a game or a space, has kind of peaked lately (one too many stupid drinks sent to me and annoying fundraising for Obama that I don't think has much accountability in all the frenzy now).

The Times piece claims there are "only a few thousand" people who play the hard-copy board game. Huh? They must be daft. I know of 4 copies regularly played just in my 10 block radius here in NY, one of them in my house. There are way more than that around the world. Scrabble is in every game cupboard and playroom, but it's another matter whether it gets played very much -- a problem is often the loss of some of the letters or the little trays, I know I just stepped on a hard little letter "T" at 6:00 am the other day and I'm not sure I didn't fling it across the room lol. That might be an argument in favour of digitalizing it online.

Still, I don't see that it is something that can be considered "in the public domain" like chess. Chess has been around for many more centuries. And chess as a strategy game can be embodied in many forms. Chess is one of those geeky Creative Commons dreams. The guts of the game are open-sourced as a concept, the moves, the characters. But you can have chess sets carved of ivory worth thousands of dollars, or little plastic tiny travel chess boards you buy for $5.99 at Rite-Aid. So it's exemplary of all that "information wants to be free" stuff with the 8 "generatives" except...Scrabble isn't chess.

Scrabble just doesn't "go" into different embodiments in the same way: you're not going to carve little Persian pillows with gold and silver encrusted letters embedded in them or make those letters any dinkier. The travel edition has to be magnetic, but still look like the other ones, which are all pretty plain. I mean, it's not something you change too much without destroying the ability to focus on the letters. I don't see why people don't get to have a copyright on something like this -- it is a design, it is a game someone thought up and even had trouble selling years ago (did the guy take 17 years or something?) and I fail to see why we need to drain dry these game companies for the sake of...addiction.

Because that's the argument that is mounted inevitably by the Times, which has a really biased article on it and really takes side. "We're addicted, so we get to steal it." Nice junkie theory there! "We play it all day in our office, so we get to have it."

Oh, and this one, by the guys who originally lifted it and put it on Facebook: "This game has been in our family for 50 years." So...a set of silverware has been in your family for years, and that entitles you to swipe a spoon next time you feel like it, and then keep swiping? Wrong.

There's also the hyping of Scrabulous, which is actually a bit fake itself. In fact, I've found some people, like me, confessing to me that they actually try to play it that it and it's too confusing to figure out, hard to follow, and many people give up after the first few plays because their partners don't answer, or they get tired of going on Facebook. Sure, there are some big enthusiasts, but they are driving this discussion, and it has to be looked at more rationally from more sides.

There is no reason in hell why the American companies should be expected to just allow the Indian company to go on making money from this. And this crap like "But they only make $25,000 from ads." "But their purpose isn't really to make money" (more eye-rolling) belongs to the same criminally-minded socialist argumentation as "but it has been in our family for years" or "I'm addicted so I get to have it". How can people get away with such immoral shit?

Theft is theft. The American company, rather than suing the pants off these Indians, could try to come to a deal with them, where they get a percentage, or they sue. And sue they must if they don't get a deal. The idea that board games are dead is one of those things geeks claim who want to promote Web 2.0 and their little start-ups and widgets. I guess they've never had to spend a rainy Monday with a 3-year-old child or they'd know better. Every time I go anywhere for the holidays or the weekend, we play board games, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Monopoly, Cosmic Encounters precisely because they can be combined with actually seeing people face to face, talking to them, and eating microwave popcorn, which you can't do online in the same way.

I just find it appalling that people can mount these specious and criminally-minded arguments that would never fly if it were something geeks valued (cash in their wallet? Their laptops?). "A lot of people are stealing it, so it's ok." "It's been in our family for years in the hard copy, so it's ok." "The owners are big American game companies we don't like as elitist geeks because we hate mass culture, so it's ok." "Not very many hard copies are out there, so it's ok." "People are addicted, so it's ok."