Hasbro, makers of the famous crossword board game Scrabble, has filed a copyright and trademark infringement suit against RJ Softwares, creators of the immensely popular Scrabulous Facebook App. The application has gained immense popularity amongst the users of the Facebook social networking website, gaining over a million regular players since it’s launch of July 2006.

Hasbro claims that it has both valid trademarks and copyrights in Scrabble. According to the Hasbro’s Complaint, the original game dates back to the Great Depression when an out-of-work architect invented the game in his spare time. The game was first brought to the market in 1948.

Scrabulous contains no formal rules, but rather relies on user’s knowledge of how to play Scrabble in order to play and enjoy the application. The application’s website, http://www.scrabulous.com, also contains meta tags that include “Scrabble online” and “free online Scrabble.”

Recently, Hasbro has licensed the rights to Scrabble to software maker Electronic Arts (“EA”) . The New York Times reports that EA has contacted RJ Softwares regarding the application but talks fell apart. EA eventually decided to create its own official scrabble game on Facebook. While the officially sanctioned application is new, it only has 8,000 users in comparison to Scrabulous, which has over a million users.

RJ Softwares is owned by two brothers, Rajat and Jaynat Agarwalla of Kolkata, India.  Hasbro has also exercised its rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to request that Facebook remove the Scrabulous application as it is claimed to be in violation of intellectual property rights. This may leave the million-plus users of Scrabulous in the dark if the issue is not resolved quickly. If Facebook were to refuse, it could face sanctions under the DMCA.

TechCrunch has featured an interesting video from GumGum, a company that looks to aspire to be the CCC of online photos and videos. Capitalizing on the economics of celebrity content, it promises to “make every license a viral sales tool for the content owner” by making it appear with a right-click:

Publishers are billed on either a pay-per-use or an ad model. Might this device play the same role in a potential copyright suit between AP and bloggers as CCC played in the Texaco case–i.e., increase the willingness of judges to force bloggers to license content?

A very cool new site that allows bloggers to share free access to documentary films:  SnagFilms.

Daniel S. Greenberg is a seasoned science journalist who has been reporting on research and industrial science for over forty years. In Science for Sale:  The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism, Greenberg explores the web of relationships among academic science, private industry, and government.

The primary strength of Greenberg’s approach to this question is his journalist’s ability to tell colorful stories, often based on personal interviews with key players, which elucidate both individual personalities and big questions. For example, Greenberg has Drummond Rennie, an activist and editor of prestigious medical journals, explain a key problem in scientific publishing: “’What we’re talking about . . . is the influence of money on research that my journal and other journals publish. The distorting influence of it. And this distorting influence is huge.’” This sort of first-hand testimony – and there is much of it in this book – is a powerful indictment of the supposed Mertonian neutrality of academic-industrial-government science.

The primary strength of Greenberg’s book, alas, is also a major weakness. Very often, the book reads like a string of tedious, unending anecdotes and quotations lacking a cohesive vision for reform – which is a fair description of the book as a whole. In a very brief concluding section on “Fixing the System,” Greenberg suggests “transparency” is the key to reform, but he never explains what this might mean. In a major omission, he does not examine at all whether “open access” publishing models might help push things towards greater transparency. Moreover, his dismissal of the Bayh-Dole Act and other legal developments that have encouraged universities to privatize their research through patent protection is so cursory that it flies by almost unnoticed. Yet the tension between “open” and “property” models of scientific research surely is both a driver and a symptom of the problems Greenberg exposes in his anecdotes and interviews.

On the whole, Science for Sale contains some useful source material for those who are interested in the sociology and business of institutional science in an age of money. It also will open the eyes of those who naively assert the neutrality of the scientific establishment. It does not, however, provide any meaningful proposals for reform.