Fair-use | billso.com

Rajat and Jayant Aggarwalla have blocked access to their Scrabulous Facebook app for US and Canadian users, according to this NY Times article called Scrabulous Barred to North American Users and anAssociated Press article called Popular Scrabble knockoff suspended on Facebook. There are lots of blog posts available, including my own billso.com post called Scrabble vs Scrabulous, Mashable’s Actually, Scrabulous Shut Themselves Down. Sort of., eFlux Media’s Scrabulous is no more and Marketing Shift’s Facebook Shutters Scrabulous; Hasboro Smiles. (Note: the spelling error was made by Marketing Shift, not me.)

It sounds like Facebook asked the brothers to take this step, after multiple requests from Hasbro.

Some Facebook users really need a lesson on copyright as well. Scrabulous may be fun, but the online groups that are defending the game are displaying their ignorance and contempt for intellectual property laws. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of Facebook Scrabulous players also downloaded unlicensed movies, songs and books from peer-to-peer services. I disucssed textbook downloading on yesterday’s billso.com post called A torrent of textbooks.

Perhaps some Scrabulous users will actually try to play Scrabble in real life, while Hasbro and Electronic Arts try to get their licensed Facebook Scrabble app to run in a reliable manner.

I’m a big fan of fair use and the Creative Commons, but I really hope Hasbro and Mattel pursue their court cases. The brothers are several weak arguments in their defense, and have shown poor judgment by collecting advertising revenue from their web site. A settlement would set an ugly precedent, and encourage more developers to create unlicensed versions of copyrighted works.

Related posts on billso.com

Copyright and fair use
Creative Commons
8 July 2008: Scrabble vs Scrabulous
11 March 2008: Widgets won’t work without a plan
25 February 2008: Social media 101
19 February 2008: Social media gets too sticky
4 February 2008: Better than free
28 January 2008: Crazy money
3 January 2008: Impression management and Facebook
5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright
17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
10 August 2007: Forty-somethings flock to Facebook
20 June 2007: Facebook vs MySpace
29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse
5 August 2006: Isolated Americans trying to connect

Tags: Canada, copyright, Creative-Commons, facebook, fair-use, games, India, license, social, social-media, USA

As we approach the start of the academic year, the rising cost of almost everything has created a surge of interest in electronic books, in legal and unlicensed versions.

As we’ve discussed in earlier billso.com articles, college textbooks are expensive. Rising oil prices have fueled steep price increases for new books, and have driven up the prices of used textbooks.

In April 2008, Sage, Oxford and Cambridge recently sued four administrators at Georgia State University. The publishers believed that digital course packs assembled by faculty and posted to university servers violated the publishers’ copyright claims, as no licenses had been purchased for the articles or textbook chapters included in these downloads. This New York Times article called Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article Publishers Sue Georgia State U. for Copyright Infringement have additional details.

Meanwhile, one of the largest operators of college bookstores has purchased an e-publishing company. Follett believes that CafeScribe will become a dominant player in college e-book publishing, by helping students and faculty self-publish their materials in a social networking environment while offering electronic versions of printed textbooks. See this Will the CafeScribe Acquisition Give a Boost to Electronic Textbooks? for an interview with CafeScribe’s CEO, Bryce Johnson.

Textbook publishers have reluctantly adopted e-book and web-based publishing technologies, including multiple types of digital rights management (DRM). Some systems require students to log on or access the digital book from one specific computer. Other systems check for multiple sessions logged in with identical usernames.

Some publishers bundle web site access with new copies of their books. A coupon is included with the book, including a subscription code that gives the purchasing student 3 to 6 months of access to a companion web site that may include additional readings, exercises, downloads and streaming media. The coupon is useless after it’s used, so purchasers of the used book have to find their own access to the companion web site, or do without that material.

Scanning the material

Digital systems help publishers reduce their costs, but students continue to find way to break or defeat these systems. Creating a scanned textbook can be a labor-intensive task, but it’s manageable when the work is distributed among a group of people. The paper format of a book has been a mild form of physical rights management (PRM). There’s more discussion in this New York Times article called First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

The scanned book is a collection of high-resolution image files, in which each page is captured as a single image file. Pages can be color corrected so that the final collection has natural renditions of the textbook’s colors. While this is trivial for a book that is entirely text, many college textbooks use multiple fonts, colors, images and callouts to engage the reader.

The image files are numbered in sequential order and cembedded into PDF files. If there are additional downloads or scereen captures from the companion website or optical disks, these files and the images can be compressed into a massive ZIP or RAR file.

In the past, the size of the file was a barrier to distribution. The widespread availability of broadband Internet access, along with massive, inexpensive hard drives, have driven down the average student’s costs of textbook piracy.

Encrypting the Internet

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are a popular distribution point for unlicensed, scanned versions of college textbooks.

ISPs and copyright holders have developed elaborate systems to monitor and disrupt P2P networks. the BitTorrent protocol includes encryption support, to help users hide the contents of their packets. This newsteevee.com article called The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet describes how one of the most popular P2P sites, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, has proposed nothing less than a new encryption protocol to protect Internet traffic while in transit.

Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets or IPETEE could be installed as an application or driver in the client’s operating system, allowing any and every net-aware application on the computer to connect with encrypted peers and servers. Of course, ISPs could still detect the patterns and quantity of traffic coming from an encrypted client, and throttle or shut down the client’s bandwidth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a chapter editor on a textbook that is scheduled for 2010. It’s called Managing Through Collaboration. I’ve also published a chapter in another textbook, and I was a contributing author on a Sybex CIW Foundations book in 2002. See the billso.com books page for more details.

Related pages on billso.com

Copyright and fair use
30 July 2008: Scrabulous access blocked for US and Canadian Facebook users

Tags: authentication, Canada, copyright, facebook, fair-use, India, network, revenue, social, USA

Read 1 comment

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.