I’m a professional Scrabble player (by which I mean I play competitively, not that I manage to make living doing it!). Many of us are upset with Hasbro’s handling of their ownership of Scrabble, for various reasons I won’t go into here. So I have some questions about Scrabble’s copyright and other legal issues.
What exactly is Scrabble? A copyright? An invention? A trademark?
When will it pass into public domain? The new rule is life of creator plus 50 years. Alfred Butts died in 1993, so will it be in 2043, or does the fact that it is owned by a company change anything?
What will happen once it goes into public domain? Will other companies be able to crank out Scrabble games, just like anyone can manufacture a chess set? Or will they be able to do this but not call it Scrabble?
What’s the rule on the copyright of games played on a Scrabble board? Somebody has made a Scrabble watch whose face shows the board from the last game of the 1993 world championships. This clearly violates Hasbro’s rights, but what of the two players who played the game? If Hasbro wanted to manufacture such a thing, would they need the permission of the players? I’m pretty sure chess games don’t have this sort of protection, but Scrabble games, unlike chess, consist of words placed on a board, and are therefore some sort of literary creation.
The game likely had a patent (which has since expired), a trademark (to protect the name of the game), and a copyright (to cover the rules and other decorative material on the board). The trademark can be renewed indefinitely as long as it is being used. The copyrights are still in effect and will likely still be in effect unless you intend to live forever.
The copyrights are likely held by the company that owns the game. They are good for a fixed period of time, but the U.S. government keeps extending those periods.
The trademark will likely never expire. If someone made a game similar to Scrabble with identical rules, it might be pass legal muster, but that company would face so many lawsuits for trademark or copyright infringement that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to try.
No clue on #4. I will pass and draw seven new questions.
I don’t all the issues of which you speak, but as an internet Scrabble player I know that the sites a few years ago were relentlessly hounded by Hasbro. A lot of them went private/underground. People were annoyed–they all were loyal scrabble players and customers–they bought the game, the dictionaries, other licensed things. It’s not like they were using the internet to get out of paying for scrabble products. They felt that the sites were promoting the game, not impinging on the copyright or market share. And no one (to my knowledge) was making $$ off the sites.
Why do people always make the effort to say that a copyright violator “isn’t making any money”? That’s totally irrelevant. You don’t have to make money in order for it to be a copyright violation.
“They felt that the sites were promoting the game.” Isn’t it the copyright holder’s determination if the site is promoing the game or not? Aren’t they the ones who should decide how and when they want to promote their own property?
You can answer that any way you wish, but the law makes it quite clear that Hasbro is well within its right in doing exactly what they’re doing. You have no right to determine what to do with someone else’s property – or would you like to have someone else determine what to do with yours?
I don’t know that you can patent a game. Certainly the rules of a game are subject matter of copyright (which does expire), and the name can be trademarked (which can last as long as someone seeks to enforce their TM rights), but once the copyright on the game itself expires, it will be open to anyone to make generic Scrabble-type games under their own names. There are already numerous generic board games that are variants of games that are in the public domain.