April 06, 2008

Mattel Offers Its Own "Scrabulous," Minus the Fabulous Part

Link: Scrabble Tries to Fight a Popular Impostor at Its Own Game - New York Times.

The case raises a number of wonderful theoretical questions:

It raises the issue raised in the French Yahoo experts report that led to disagreement among the experts (with Vint Cerf dissenting): whether individuals who want certain access in cyberspace are likely to volunteer information that will lead to that access being denied:

In recent weeks, Gamehouse, a division of RealNetworks, introduced “Scrabble by Mattel” on the social networking site Facebook. The game, an online version of Scrabble, is technically available only to players outside the United States and Canada, though it relies on users to be honest about their location to make that distinction.

That issue raises of course the question (if one does not believe that it is likely that users will honestly self-report) as to whether Mattel is violating Hasbro's U.S/Canadian trademark to "Scrabble."

The dispute even includes a sort-of anti-commons problem:

The rights to Scrabble are owned by multiple and competing companies, a situation that seems to be hobbling the game’s introduction to Facebook and other social networking sites, and complicating negotiations with the creators of Scrabulous.

As of Sunday, the official Scrabble game had attracted fewer than 2,000 daily Facebook users, in contrast to more than 600,000 on Scrabulous.

Facebook Scrabble takes a long time to load, does not always quickly update to show recent moves, and the words the game will accept do not reflect standard Scrabble dictionaries, or even the English language. In a recent game, for example, Scrabble by Mattel accepted "feen" and "ami" but not "zen." There is no way to challenge opponents’ moves at this time.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 6, 2008 at 08:36 PM in Digitization | Permalink