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And BTW, while we are discussing American "freedoms", what's all this about about allowing people to ask for your receipts and inspect your bags when exiting a supermarket in the US even though you are not suspected of doing anything wrong?

With the exception of stores where you buy a membership and in so doing enter into an agreement that they can inspect your purchases, that's not allowed here unless the shopper agrees to it.

It's perfectly fine for a merchant to ask a shopper "Can I look in your bags?" It's just as perfectly fine for the shopper to tell the merchant to go pound sand, but a lot of Americans are unaware that they have that right.

Unfortunately, sometimes the merchants and law enforcement are equally unaware of these points of law, and so inappropriate things happen, but that's reflective on the particular idiots violating peoples' rights rather than our law as a whole.

http://www.thelegality.com/200... is a pretty good summary of how it works over here, if you're interested.

because The Legality only updates once a week, and half the time the topic is something that /. doesn't give two shits about.

And yet that darn pesky article seems to think otherwise.

Hasbro also asked Facebook to remove the game for violating copyright law under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Which is it? If it is a trademark then the DMCA does not apply. The 'C' doesn't stand for 'Trademark'. And if they are claiming that this is a copyright violation then they are on pretty thin legal ice as there isn't a lot about the game which is copyrightable.

So which is it? Copyright or trademark? Has Hasbro engaged in perjury by issuing a DMCA takedown notice over a trademark dispute, or are they pursuing an unwinnable copyright case?

Yes. There is a serious doubt, at least on one of their claims.

They are raising two basic claims, under trademark law and copyright law. The trademark claim is basically that consumers will be confused into thinking this had something to do with Hasbro. The similarity of the names -- "Scrabble" v. "Scrabulous" doesn't help much. But, changing the name solves that problem.

The harder case for Hasbro is the copyright claim -- games have "thin" copyrights. In general, the only elements that are protected are (a) the text of the instructions and (b) the graphical elements. So, if Scrabulous didn't copy the Scrabble instructions and didn't copy the graphical elements, they should be fine.

Even on the graphical elements, if there are a small number of ways of expressing something, that expression is not protected either. So, for example, you need some way of putting both the point value and letter on each tile. With a small number of ways of doing so, I suspect that the tiles themselves are not protected. It's possible that Scrabulous might be dinged for copying Hasbro's choice of colors for the squares.

I have not played Scrabulous, so I just have no idea how this plays out.

Great blog post at http://www.thelegality.com/archives/11

As an academic who's written critical works on contemporary media, I'm all for fair use and the freedom for fans or opponents to employ some material in their own work. But that isn't what this proposed Lexicon is, in truth.

This isn't fair use (news reporting, educational or criticism, although the publisher tries to pretend the latter) or transformative in any way: van der Ark's Lexicon is a summary of elements in the work. That means that, as a secondary work about Harry Potter, this is much more akin to the Castle Rock case: copying fragments of the work.

More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications (like some of the other guidebooks she's produced), while this work is taking the unpaid labour of countless fans who contributed to the Lexicon website and turning it to the personal profit of the site's disgruntled owner (who's cranky because his good buddy "Jo" wouldn't give him a paying job in the UK to edit her own encyclopedia).

The whole imbroglio has been amply covered by the helpful souls at Fandom Wank if you want to get a feel for what others besides OSC have said. (Anne Rice has even weighed in!)

Scrabble can be, and has been Copyrighted. A colleague of mine, Steve Glista, wrote a detailed and insightful piece about exactly that. Check it out: http://www.thelegality.com/archives/11

Since there's piles of misinformation, this should explain a lot of the legal side:
http://www.thelegality.com/archives/11

That clear up the trademark/copyright distinction?

Anyone who needs a refresher on the free-speech implications can find it here (although digg found it first, so the whole article is temporarily posted static on the main page):

Vying for Control of the Internet: is Wikileaks Unstoppable?