Apple has sued Psystar, the marketers of the Open Computer, according to Jorge Espinoza’s article, Apple Goes After Clone Maker Psystar, and ZDnet. Apple seems to have a solid case, as Psystar modified Apple’s software as part of the Florida company’s product offerings. The original name of the Psystar product was the OpenMac, which didn’t please Apple, either.
Electronic Arts is publishing an authorized version of Scrabble for US and Canadian users of Facebook. It will compete head-to-head against the popular Indian knockoff Scrabulous, which has become a popular pastime on the social networking site.
The developers of Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, may face multiple lawsuits by Hasbro and Mattel, the companies that purchased the rights to Scrabble.
The brothers contend that they are not copying Scrabble - they are merely adapting ideas for a new game. Fair use is a weak argument, as Scrabble has been sold under license in India for several decades. Scrabble is also protected under multiple patents and copyrights around the world. Scrabulous uses the same number of tiles found in Scrabble, along with identical point values, and an identical game board.
The brothers admitted in this New York times article, Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words, that they are earning at least US$25,000 in dvertising revenue from their Facebook game. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article.
Mattel licensed its own Facebook version of Scrabble in March 2008, but the Facebook app provided by RealNetworks cannot be played by US and Canadian Facebook users. It’s trivial for Facebook to identify these users, either by IP addresses or user profiles. Hasbro owns the Scrabble license for the US and Canada, and has licensed the EA version for Facebook. Both Mattel and Hasbro considered a settlement with the brothers, but the idea was abandoned for fear of creating a precedent.
See this Associated Press story, Facebook could see a standoff over Scrabble, for more details.
Image courtesy of allyrose18 through a Creative Commons license.
So the Associated Press thinks they can stop web sites from linking to AP stories. Sounds like an overeager lawyer dug a hole for themselves, or just forgot about the fair use doctrine. After all, the AP is a major supplier of news content to Google, Yahoo, CNN, and almost every major newspaper in the United States.
See Tech Crunch for more details.
Update 16 June 2008: The New York Times has a long discussion about the AP’s reaction to a proposed blog boycott of the AP.
Sunday, 1 June 2008, was the 100th anniversary of the first sale doctrine in the US.
As I’ve mentioned before in this billso.com article on 24 March 2008, the first sale doctrine allows someone who buys a book to resell it or pass it along as they see fit.
This important principle of US copyright law applies to other media, too. Last month, a Federal court upheld the rights of eBay sellers to vend software, according to this Ars Technia article. First sale allows people to resell or give away CDs, DVDs and other works that they purchased.
Creative Commons licenses allow users to share and adapt applicable works, which is an excellent extension of the first sale doctrine.
See this article in Everybody’s Libraries for more details
We use a Creative Commons license scheme at billso.com.
The license is embedded in every page of the site, and there is a link at the bottom of each page.
In short, anyone can use content from billso.com as long as the following conditions are met:
This
work is licensed under a
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