Philosophy Bites is not a criticism, but the name of a podcast that I highly recommend. They have a blog, (http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/) and of course they’re available on iTunes for subscription. If you doubt the value of podcasting, then ask yourself when was the last time you heard anyone discuss Wittgenstein on your local classic rock station (although, as everyone knows, “Stairway to Heaven” was heavily influenced by the old logikmeister).
A number of people have already attempted to console me over the upcoming demise of Scrabulous, which is, as the VCA can easily understand, an interesting subject for me. I have written often and rather sternly about the concept of intellectual property. I tend to believe that if I create something, and am so inclined, I ought to be able to profit from the fruit of my labors. Herr Marx might have believed that dialectic materialism meant eliminating private property, but personally I’m a firm believer in having my own stuff, and I don’t draw the line at material goods. If I own a tree that bears a lot of fruit, you are not entitled to the fruit just because you would like some fruit, even if that fruit is tantalizingly close at hand. You can easily reach over and grab an apple. That does not mean it is right for you to do so. I apply that same logic to intellectual property. My previous arguments have all been regarding music. Just because it is easy to appropriate music via the internet does not make it an ethically correct action. Assume that a musician wishes to be paid for work. I can freely choose not to buy that musician’s work if I have some objection to paying for it, but I can not freely choose to steal it. The ethical Lockean property aspects are my reasoning for this, but the obvious outcome of artists creating and people not paying is that eventually artists will starve to death and there won’t be any art, or in other words, we’re going to be awfully disappointed when there’s no more new music to put on our iPods, so there’s consequences to this stealing of art in addition to its deontological immorality. Scrabulous, which is nothing more than a Facebook version of Scrabble, absolutely fits into the pattern of intellectual property theft. The owners of the intellectual property known as Scrabble have a right to that property until such time as that right expires in the marketplace according to the given rules of law on such things. Agree or disagree with those laws, and plenty of people disagree with the (literal) Mickey Mouse extensions on IP that seem to be stretching to infinity, that doesn’t mean you are free to break them. Even you Pffffters this month are not claiming on the con that civil disobedience is justified in the fight for more free stuff for your iPods. So there’s little question that Scrabulous infringes on the rights of the owners of the IP known as Scrabble.
But here’s the problem. Everything I’ve said about the ethics of the situation notwithstanding, the solution is not the blocking of Scrabulous. Scrabble, like most corporate entities no doubt represented by lawyers who have their secretaries print out their email for them, or, like Ted Kennedy, claim that someone sent them an internet last week, simply don’t get it. No, I’m not recommending that they allow freebooters to purloin the fruits of their intellectual labors, but the canny corporation ought to be able to see a little further than the mere theft of IP. I would venture a guess that Scrabulous has made the rather musty game of Scrabble way more popular than it was three months ago. I haven’t played Scrabble in years, and Scrabulous had me digging out my game and bringing it to Regis. How many other people will dig up their old games, or better yet from Scrabble’s point of view, buy new ones, as a result of the popularity of Scrabulous? Scrabble seems to be making the same mistake that all corporations make when confronted by new technologies. They don’t understand them, so they simply try to make them go away.
Let’s face it. The Scrabulous guys don’t have a leg to stand on in this situation. So what should Scrabble do? Settle. Quietly, out of court. We need not know officially what happened. And the end result? Scrabulous will be owned by Scrabble. It will not go away. The Scrabulous guys will be paid off handsomely, and the Scrabble people will have the best thing that’s happened to them since the invention of the two-letter word starting with X. By some incredible twist of fate, and thanks to Scrabulous, musty old Scrabble has become a hip Web 2.0 application. Scrabble can either take this ball and run with it, or become musty old Scrabble again. And the lesson here applies to numerous companies. The best thing that ever happened to Comcast was the redistribution of Comedy Channel shows on YouTube, making this material way more popular than it had been and directing people to watch the shows on TV. Comcast pulled the content. They lost the best free advertisement they could have ever prayed for. Sure, there need to be some limits consistent with IP ownership, but at the point where corporations pointedly pull back from the real power of the internet, that nebulous ability to make things popular in ways you weren’t expecting, then all the corporate concentration on “maximizing their digital position” and the like are the empty idiocy that they sound like. The problem is not that the lunatics are running the asylums; the problem is that the psychiatrists running the asylums don’t know the difference between lunacy and brilliance.
And, oh yeah, if they take away Scrabulous, my life will just be an empty shell. Sigh.
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