Mattel and Scrabulous

I’ve not played Scrabble for years, until I joined Facebook and found Scrabulous. In the last few months I’ve played quite a few games and worked out new ways to play given the ubiquity of tools around to easily produce high scoring words. It enticed me enough to consider playing again with the board version – which means I’d need to buy a version.

Now Mattel, owners of the rights to the game outside of the US and Canada, have asked Facebook to take down the game, which does, clearly, infringe their rights.

Matt Dickman has pulled together a great list of the sort of things they could be doing to make the most of the 600k active players of the game. Partnering with them, getting them to build a Mattel version for other social networks, getting them to share revenue – ie licence it formally – must all be better than just asking for it to be closed down. Of course, for all we know they may have already asked the makers to do this and got knocked back, leaving them with no other recourse than to proceed with legal action, but I get the feeling that this is their first move to date.

Again we have the dichotomy of a legal system that means the company HAVE to defend their trademark and IP with legal action versus the opportunities that technology offer them, in ways and speeds that often exceed the ability of companies to grasp them. One result may be to continuously keep an eye on what is going on and then workout partnerships; or employ some of the developers to do it for them. One thing companies can’t do is ignore it all.