Regarding IP circumvention via UGC: fascinating topic, and not a simple one! For example, didn’t NCsoft eventually choose to settle with Marvel over City of Heroes? (Refresher: CoH users were creating characters that looked like Marvel characters — an entirely understandable phenomenon and, IMO, one that was much less questionable than a developer blatantly ripping off Scrabble for profit.) If NCsoft settled under those circumstances, then it seems that a game like Wordscraper, having been developed by a previous offender, might find itself in hot water faster than anticipated. But, of course, Team Scrabble is in a funny position now. They’ve already been made into devils by Scrabulous supporters. If they go after Wordscraper, they will piss even more people off. Which, once again, brings me back to my original point — Team Scrabble should have found a way to make a deal with the developers of Scrabulous, or at least been smarter about supplanting them.

1) Ideas on how I think Facebook themselves were in a position to broker a solution between the five parties:
http://www.kimpallister.com/2008/01/scrabulous-solution-open-letter-to-mark.html

2) How the IP-rights-by-territory is a great example of how last century’s laws hinder progress in today’s world:
http://www.kimpallister.com/2008/04/note-to-ip-holders-my-friendships.html

3) Details on the lawsuit:
http://www.kimpallister.com/2008/07/scrabblescrabulous-scrap-specifics.html

Some additional thoughts:

- It’s reaonable to think that Scrabulous could have held up against a lawsuit had they not been so overt about it. Different name, colors for tiles, etc, and I’m not sure they would have so easily taken down. But would they have seen the same kind of uptake? I dunno.

- Dave, I’m SUPER surprised you missed this point: Wordscraper, as Nick notes, is from the same creators, and supports user-definable boards and tile weightings. Which means you can do, as I have done, a board and tile set that exactly match those of Scrabble, and VOILA! IP circumvention via User Generated Content!!!

–Two issues with the point above: 1) right now anyway, you can’t then publish that rule set, which means each person wanting to host a rip off of scrabble has to spend 10 minutes or so recreating it. 2) If they were to publish something like a board-sharing service, the developer (or FB?) would be subject to DMCA takedown notices, but now Hasbro/Mattel has a harder job: Vigilantly watch the forums, send repeated DMCA takedown notices, etc. Also, I don’t know if other countries have similar laws.

So their advice to you (I infer) would be to play Wordscraper. Then, if and when it gets taken down, play the next game that gets released a week later with a different name and slightly changed features. Rinse and repeat, thus doing an end run around a dysfunctional copyright regime.

Not that I’m condoning them. I’m just inferring their position based on their behavior.

My advice to someone inspired by the creators of Scrabulous would be to try something that artists of all kinds have been trying for ages — build on the shoulders of giants, but don’t blatantly rip anyone off.