Slashdot Mirror
Hasbro Using DMCA on Facebook Game Apps
Boggle Addict writes "Rather than participating in the online gaming market, Hasbro is suppressing it with litigation. Scrabulous, a Scrabble imitation, is already fighting to prevent being shut down. Today, Hasbro sent out DMCA notices to other apps on Facebook, including Bogglific, a Boggle imitation. Copyright law has has always held very limited protections for games. This may be opening a can of worms for Hasbro.
I'm confused here.. DMCA is for copyright, that's what the C stands for.. but no part of what was taken was? It's possible it was patented (I believe game mechanics are patented) but there is no DMPA is there? TFA says that they have a "solid case" but I'm not seeing that this "solid case" is what is trying to be used here.. There is no copyright on scrabble. There's a copyright on the scrabble box design, and the scrabble instructions, and perhaps even on the actual design of the board, but not the overall layout of it. There's a trademark on "Scrabble" probably as well, on which "Scrabulous" might infringe.
I can see a pretty solid case on Trademark or Patent grounds, but copyright is the one thing that WASN'T infringed.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Or, they could offer to license it and not be asshat about things. Not everything works best by running to lawyers first. In fact, most things don't work best that way (if at all). Lawyers are best suited as asshats that go after other asshats. If you're first response is to find a lawyer, you're an asshat.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't want to get into whether they have a copyright on those types of games, but I do want to talk about the trademark issue.
Calling a Scrabble knockoff Scrabulous or a Boggle knockoff Bogglific is pretty clear gounds for trademark infringement. I mean, this site is Slashdot. If I created a Slashdot.us - and always referred to it as Slashdot.us - it's still too close to being Slashdot. Same with Slashdotic or something like that. People who are casual observers would get confused as to the owner. And in order to keep that trademark, they have to litigate. So, if someone were to create a Slashdot.us site, Slashdot would have to file against them. If they didn't, slashdot would become a generic term like aspirin that anyone could use.
Now, I'm sure Hasbro doesn't just want them to change the name, but they have a really great case there. While Hasbro is being craptacular here, the Scrabulous people aren't completely innocent - they wanted to play off the Scrabble name to make money.
Yeah. You'd think that a community that cares as much about IP abuses as the tech crowd in these parts would at least know their enemy.
Hey kids, take some friendly advice: Nobody will care about your arguments, no matter how sound they are on some basic level, if you don't even get the terminology right. At best, you'll just confuse your target audience, and you won't convince them of anything. At worst, they'll think anybody that complains about IP abuse is just another idiot.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
depends...what flavor Jello are they using?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They probably reached for the lawyers first because they'd already signed a licensing deal for online Scrabble to EA. From the Fortune blog linked to in the summary:
I don't know the specifics about that deal, but I'll bet exclusivity was part of it. And why shouldn't they have signed an exclusive deal with whoever was going to make them the most money? It is, after all, their trademark, and they get to decide how and who uses their trademark according to whatever logic they use. You may argue that they could have made more money with the "Free Advertising" model of "license it to everybody and more people will buy the hardcopy of the game", but they probably thought this was the better deal.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
Once again we have a commercial entity who, instead of using digital media as a gateway to selling their product, prefer to shut down anything they don't control directly.
How many younger people who play games almost exclusively online have ever played Scrabble or Boggle? Why would a company like Hasbro want to shut down a site that might actually inspire some online gamers to go buy a physical copy of the game?
Other than chronic business myopia, that is.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
...to set some money aside for legal fees. Why? Because as Brad Blumenthal told me about 15 years ago "Some bastard is going to sue you". It doesn't matter if they are right, or if you are right, it's just going to happen. Waving the white flag that says "I can't afford to fight" just makes the bastard stronger.
And let's face it, if you are pulling in $25K monthly on virtually no expense base, you can't turn around and bleat about not having the money to fight it.
Nice pun, but other than greed, what motivates these companies to keep such a lock-in on their products? We're not talking about products that are brand spanking new and are threatened with extinction if people start using alternatives; these are products that have been around for ages and ages, since before I was born in '62, and will probably stay around for a long time yet to come. They've made their money from them and then some.
Instead of wasting it on lawyers and legal fees, why not spend the money on innovating new games and or new forms of already present games, since obviously someone else is providing what they either have not been able to provide or cannot?
...these are products that have been around for ages and ages, since before I was born in '62, and will probably stay around for a long time yet to come. They've made their money from them and then some.
Wait, you're not ACTUALLY suggesting that copyright be allowed to work the way it was originally intended, are you? Don't you know that it's not about encouraging new stuff, it's all about milking your old stuff for years and years, down through the generations, thus allowing you to sit on your ass and rake in money in perpetuity while ensuring that no one else can ever riff off of your old ideas!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I don't get why knock off people can build excellent scrabble online and offline versions, but Hasbro the owner in over 10 years can not make a single one...
All the imitators probably tried to make a decent product to compete. Hasbro doesn't need to; it can cease&desist all other versions off the internet. No need to invest in programmers, when you've got a lawyer on staff...
I saw the "60 Minutes" segment on 'Facebook'. Facebook wants-needs money and is thinking of Ads in their 'groups'. Would this online-Facebook gaming not be good FOR Hasbro? Seems like Hasbro should fire the lawyers and send their Marketing people to talk to Facebook. Maybe, a "lite" multi-player version. Big companies need to evolve their OLD business models into the 21st Century. RU listening RIAA/MPAA ?
* Oddzon
* Cap Candy
And while Wizards currently produces the Avalon Hill line, it was purchased by Hasbro before Wizards was a part of the company.
For the pedantic, companies acquired by Wizards before the Hasbro buyout:
* TSR
* Five Rings Publishing
* Last Unicorn Games