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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

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. 

Related pages on billso.com

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

From the New York Times: US universities are partnering with international schools to add global reach to existing executive MBA (EMBA) programs. UCLA awards EMBA degree to students from National University of Singapore, after the students complete residency programs in Los Angeles, Bangalore, Shanghai and Singapore.

HPU’s EMBA program is conducted entirely in Honolulu. Surely there are universities around the world that would send their EMBA students to Hawaii for a few weeks. The University of North Florida is located in Jacksonville, and according to this article, students are willing to attend UNF’s Global MBA program.

The EMBA degree is expensive, but there are alternatives. Henry Mintzberg picks apart MBA programs in his book, Managers Not MBAs. He makes some excellent points. The MBA is not a cure-all or a golden ticket. I earned my MBA in 1988 with limited work experience. I spent a few years in the late 1990s in industry, and I consult on Oahu. My life is like an never-ending post-doctorate in management.

I followed a link on BoingBoing to this Times of India article: Delhi is getting a 45-kilometer monorail system.

The technology panel will announce their selection for Honolulu’s proposed fixed guideway mass transit system tomorrow, according to this article in the Honolulu Advertiser. The five panel members are evaluating four technologies, including:

1. trains (steel wheel on steel rail)
2. buses (rubber tire on concrete)
3. monorail
4. magnetic levitation

The decision will also be announced on the Honolulu High Capacity Transit Corridor’s web site. The video simulation of the proposed Aloha Tower station is pretty good. Most of the site’s content is trapped in PDF files, however.

As I posted on 6 February 2008, I support the bus option. This option could create a two-lane elevated road that can also be used by emergency vehicles. The buses for this system might also be deployed on surface roads as demand warrants. The other three technologies are less flexible and more expensive. City councilmembers Donovan Dela Cruz and Ann Kobayashi appeared on the byline for this article in the Honolulu Star-Builletin on 26 August 2007. The article includes a picture of one bus model. Below is a promotional video for the Eindhoven bus system.

The Washington Post reported yesterday on allegations that US Customs agents have inspected and confiscated laptop computers, iPods, and mobile phones during passenger inspections. Passengers claim they were asked to provide passwords and open files. In some cases, mobile phones were inspected and returned with purged call logs. One person claims their laptop has been held for an over a year.

According to this article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have filed a civil lawsuit against the Federal Government, based on 20 complaints from Northern California residents. The goal is disclosure of the US government’s boder search policies. One sourse of concern is an apparent pattern of racial profiling, in which agents targeted Asian and Muslim passengers.

The US Department of Justice asserts that electronic equipment falls into the same category as a briefcase, and may be searched and confiscated for inspection.

However, the scenarios described in this article sound more like coercion or out-and-out robbery.

Of course, many corporate travelers have confidential or private information on their computers and phones. The Post article cites a Canadian law firm that sends corporate travelers headed to the United States with “empty hard drives”. There’s an operating system and a web browser on the laptop, of course, but employees access their email and documents through a secure Internet connection such as a virtual private network (VPN). This helps keep confidential data off the drive, as the law firm fears discovery by search more than a hacked Internet connection.

BoingBoing and the Consumerist each had articles about the Post report, although both blogs misidentified US Customs as the TSA.

Sadly, the activities alleged in this lawsuit do not surprise me. BusinessWeek recently reported on Indian IT outsourcing firms that have systematically underpaid IT workers who were brought to the United States on H1-B visas. These workers make tempting targets, as their outsourcing companies can send the workers back home for any reason. By the time some workers determined they would never get their back-pay, they were no longer in the US. It seems that only a few lawyers or client companies will step in to help these guest workers.