I argued yesterday that Facebook should fight against the two toy companies that own Scrabble. Those firms, Mattel and Hasbro, reportedly want Facebook to immediately remove a third-party application that gives Facebook members free access to an unlicensed Scrabble knockoff.

I said that while Mattel and Hasbro doubtless have the law on their side, the law is stupid and should be changed. Though I respect the concept of protecting intellectual property to spur invention, Scrabble was invented more than 50 years ago and should, by now, be in the public domain. If Mattel and Hasbro want to make more money, they should have to invent a new and better game.

Reader David Reese wrote in to inform me of the relevant laws and treaties, and the letter was so good I didn’t want to bury it in comments:

This issue is a large part controlled by the U.S. participation in the Berne convention which establishes a minimum copyright term of life plus 50 years. The U.S., in the Sonny Bono act, further increased that copyright to life plus 75 years. The only way around this for facebook is to create a game similar to Scrabble but to not use any of the traditional scrabble components - like the board, the letter blocks, the exact same scoring system, etc; but still similar in nature but even in that case Hasbro is going to go to court. They have loads of properties like Scrabble (Monopoly, for example) that they regularly and vigorously protect. Occasionally they lose but more often than not they win.

I still feel we should change the law, but clearly it would be difficult, particularly when international treaties are involved.

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