The Green Revolution 2.0
Over on HuffPo, I wrote up some thoughts on Bill Gates' announcement this morning that he intends to bring the Green Revolution to Africa and South Asia. The timing worked out well because I woke up this morning eager to avoid working on a story I've got going on biotech agriculture. When I landed on CNN.com this morning, I knew I could use some of that research to instead write up a post on Bill's news. That's called synergy, I think.
Q&A with Public Knowledge's Alex Curtis on Scrabulous
Alex Curtis is the policy director for Public Knowledge, a Washington DC based advocacy group "working to defend citizens' rights in the emerging digital culture." I asked Alex if he would answer a few questions aimed at helping us make sense of the fight over Scrabulous, the popular Facebook application targeted by Scrabble makers Mattel and Hasbro.
Nancy Scola: The mission statement of the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group -- 48,000 members strong and growing -- asserts this: "The copyright infringement is obvious and, in retrospect, the developers of Scrabulous should have done more to create their own spin on it." Do you agree with them that what we're looking at in this situation is a clear case of copyright infringement?
Alex Curtis: I haven't read the formal claims, but from parsing through what the Reuters article wrote it's not clear that this is a case of copyright infringement but instead one of trademark infringement. It's possible because of at least the close spelling that consumers might confuse the source of the makers of "Scrabulous" with the makers of "Scrabble." It's still unclear, but at a minimum it appears to be a misstatement by the media that this is a copyright claim, and is instead a move to protect a trademark.
Copyright grants an exclusive right to the creator of an original work expressed in a tangible medium. It doesn't protect ideas, per se, it's the specific expression of those ideas. The protection of ideas is the purview of patent. Trademark is a different kind of "intellectual property," because instead of being exclusive rights based it's more of a consumer protection. Trademark is used to help consumers identify the source of a product or service. The creators of Scrabble would use trademark to protect the name "Scrabble." Copyright might be used to protect the specific expression of the layout of the board and maybe the specific look of the tiles, except to the extent that those expressions are functional.
The functional aspects of the game -- how many tiles are on the board, strategic placement of the tile multiplier spots, those are more than likely functional parts of the game and not a "creative" work that copyright would protect. The functional ideas, those again, would be protected by patent, and you can look that up for Scrabble -- it's application #02752158, dated June 26, 1956.
I don't know if Hasbro/Mattel are claiming copyright protection here or not. A trademark claim makes sense, a copyright claim doesn't so much. That's because how a game is played -- the rules -- can't be copyrighted. It's functional, and that needs to be protected by a patent. Now, lets say that the Scrabulous creators went and bought a Scrabble box off the shelf, grabbed the instructions of how to play, and copied them word-for-word onto the Scrabulous Facebook application page. That'd be a violation of copyright, because the Scrabble people own a copyright in the specific way they expressed the instruction manual. But there's a difference in how a game is played (not copyrightable), and how someone explains how to play the game (copyrightable). The first is functional, the second is creative.
Scola: Pretend for that you're counsel for Hasbro/Mattel and you just stumbled across Scrabulous. The name is clearly a takeoff on the name of one of the games in your stable. This thing looks and plays just like Scrabble, down to the point values on the tiles. Users of Facebook, a giant and growing web platform, are clearly smitten with it. How would you have advised them to proceed?
Curtis: I'd advise them to contact the creators of Facebook and Scrabulous and let them know clearly that we thought the name of their game, Scrabulous, could cause confusion as to the source of the owner of our game, Scrabble. However, I don't think that I could advise my clients, at least not with a straight face, that there was a copyright claim. I'd have to explain to my clients that, essentially, the game play of Scrabble is in the public domain in the way that dominos, poker, and mahjong are, but that they could protect the name of the game. And the specific expressions of their version of the game -- how the gameboard looks, how we express the rules, and other non-functional aspects of the game -- via copyright.
Scola: So much of the reporting on this situation -- from the BBC to Wired News -- has attached the phrase "copyright infringement" to Scrabulous without much explanation or any substance to back up those claims. After years of RIAA aggressiveness on copyright, those words are enough to strike fear in the heart of the strongest among us. How much of this is a language problem rather than a legal one?
Curtis: I think you've hit the nail on the head--and it's the point that John Bergmayer hammered home on our blog. It's what groups like ours are combatting all the time -- general copyright ignorance of what copyright protects and of consumer rights under the law. If reporters or the public don't know the works that copyright can protect and not protect, how can they know their legal rights if the RIAA knocks on their door with an infringement claim? I don't want to blame the journalists about miscommunicating the facts here because I don't have the claims in front of me, but not challenging where the specific copyright claims were is a problem here. I would have helped immensely if one of these mass publications could have drawn a little chart to explain what IP (copyright/patent/trademark) does what, as a little cheat sheet to educate the reader.
Thanks so much for sharing your expertise, Alex. Public Knowledge's website offers primers on copyright, trademark, and patents. And should Scrabulous go offline, there's always Facebook Texas Hold 'Em.
Scrabulous Caving to Bogus Copyright Claims?
Word is today that the Scrabulous guys are considering whether to pulling the plug on their Facebook app. This bodes well for my work productivity, but you have to wonder the brothers are motivated by (a) concern that they misappropriated the creative efforts of others or (b) fear drummed up by the scores of news stories branding them copyright infringers.
Some context. After I posted a quick link a few days ago on the "enforce it or lose it" aspect of Scrabble vs. Scrabulous, my good friend David Alpert kindly pointed out that I was confusing copyright with trademark. My bad. Trademark carries the burden of having to be defended to retain its strength. Copyright is a different beast. It can be strictly enforced by its possessor or it can be asserted more loosely. That's the idea behind Creative Commons, of course. It's the reason why licenses like "Share Alike" and "No Derivatives" work -- it's a copyright holder's prerogative to say what can be done with the work (within the bounds of the law, of course).
David also pointed me to a helpful post on the blog of the advocacy group Public Knowledge. In it, John Bergmayer argues that as far as trademark goes, Mattel/Hasbro has some solid ground to stand on. There's no denying that the name "Scrabulous" is an obvious play on "Scrabble." But John also says that, as far as we know from public statements, Mattel/Hasbro has limited its complaints against Scrabulous to that question of trademark. On the copyright front, while the creative elements of Scrabble could fall under its umbrella, the ideas that guide the game aren't copyrightable -- so says the law, in fact:
The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.
Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.
Some material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game, or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container, may be registrable.
I wouldn't think that the visual elements of Scrabulous -- the colored double-points squares, for example -- would be considered creative enough to fall under that "pictoral expression" provision. It seems to me like what the law refers to there was probably intended to be things like the artwork of the "Rich Uncle Pennybags" character depicted on the Monopoly box. But the uncertainty on this point hasn't stopped any number of news stories from framing these guys as copyright infringers.
What if the Scrabulous brothers had called their app "Fun Word Tile Game" and hadn't linked to the Wikipedia entry on Scrabble as their help page? (Not the brightest of moves, no doubt.) Lawyers are gonna do what lawyers are gonna do. But would Mattle/Hasbro have much of a claim then? (Photo by terriem.)
Putting the MLK Back in MLK Day
 I'm noticing a certain strain of thinking in coverage of MLK day this year. You see it in this CNN.com article. The trend is towards remembering King not as a saintly figure of ancient history but as the robust modern activist who earned the FBI tag of "the most dangerous man in America." The colorful Dr. Cornel West well frames it as a pushback against the "Santa Clausification" of MLK.
A quick look at his history reveals that there's much more to the man and his legacy than the March on Washington. Take the very day he died, April 4, 1968. He spent it on the front lines of the union battles of the late sixties, in Memphis for the purpose of leading a labor protest by the sanitation workers of AFSCME Local 1733. Read his Letter from Birmingham Jail. It's no prisonhouse testimonial. Instead, it's a stinging rebuke of his fellow southern religious leaders who had chided him for upsetting the apple cart. I'd suggest that are shades of how the "Jesus Christ" figure is so often presented in pop culture these days. He's the kindly prince of peace, not the radical activist that even a conservative reading of the New Testament reveals. MLK inspired America towards peace and unity, no doubt. But he was also an anti-Vietnam war, anti-poverty, pro-labor warrior. His thinking on race has become mainstream. But his stances on workers' rights and war? Still extremist, I think you can argue. I suppose it's one reason why we've long seen the celebrations of his life embrace the former and ignore the latter. (Photo of MLK with Local 1733 leaders courtesy of AFSCME.)
Bonus: Here's the unlikely story of how Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a federal holiday, featuring Rep. John Conyers.
Ezra Klein on Huckabee's FairTax
The American Prospect's Ezra Klein took a look at Mike Huckabee's FairTax plan and came away as summarily unimpressed as I was. Again, there are three main bullet points to the Huck's economic plan: (1) abolish the IRS, (2) impose a sales tax in the neighborhood of 30%, and (3) issue each and every American a monthly "prebate" check to render basic living expenses tax free. (I think Ezra is being too casual in dismissing prebates as "a minor...scheme that's not really worth going into." To start, it seems to me that we the people have a legitimate interest in which government agency President Huckabee will have us depending on for our monthly living stipends.) Guided by smarter economic minds than mine, I'm not entirely unconvinced that a hefty consumption tax couldn't possibly work in this county. But there's no sign anywhere that Huckabee himself understands his plan enough to actual lead its responsible implementation. Maybe Chuck Norris is working on a detailed policy package. Dunno.
And that in my mind is what's most striking about Huckabee's FairTax plan. It's not so much the economics, It's the mystery of it all. The press presents Ron Paul as an absurd looney tunes for economic proposals that are only slightly more extremist than Huckabee's. The Huck smiles, says something clever, and seems to get a free pass. I admit to having missed a few of the million Republican debates this cycle, but I'm pretty sure that Huckabee hasn't been anywhere near properly grilled about this economic scheme. That may have been fine when he was an asterisk in this race, but that's risky business now that he's one of three Republican frontrunners. (Photo by yaquina under a Creative Commons license.)
Using SMS to Start Spreading the News
I'm pleased as punch to have a post up at the remarkable WorldChanging. The general subject: how Kenyans are communicating amidst post-election turmoil. The focus: a neat way activists are using SMS/text-messaging to create new media. You see, Safaricom has this program called M-PESA that lets subscribers text both airtime minutes and cash money -- the minutes are auto-loaded onto the recipient's phone, the cash can be collected at local shops. Texting cash is obviously a boon to Kenya's many "unbanked." But texting minutes took on new importance when the situation turned messy and pre-paid phone users found themselves unable to get to shops to re-up. I've been interviewing Kenya IndyMedia's John Bwakali over the last several days. He let me in on how media activists are making use of that program to give voice to to those Kenyans otherwise shut out of the national discussion.
Hope you'll have a look, and even let me know what you think in the comments.
Spring Hiking in January
Thought I might share a picture. Jane and I and a handful of friends went hiking in Shelter Island's Mashomack Reserve on what was an unseasonably warm day today. So great to get some fresh air this deep into winter. But even more spectacular is the word "Mashomack." Mash-ooo-mack -- I think I annoyed the heck outta my hiking buddies by repeating it over and over again. Course, that's just one of the many wonderful Native Indian-derived names out here on Long Island. I also really like "Shinnecock," "Hauppauge," and especially "Quogue."
Information Struggles to Be Free in Kenya
 Scanning Kenya's Daily Nation news site for the latest on the troubles,
I came across a story about information that made my heart sink. The people
of Eldoret in western Kenya who survived the horrific violence of this past
week are now finding that they can't restart their lives
simply because they lost so much of their personal data in the chaos: ID
cards, school papers, ATM cards. Reading that story reminded me of the fight
that some of my former colleagues on Capitol Hill have long engaged in to win
restitution
for Holocaust victims whose insurance records were destroyed in the war
-- some 60 years after the fact! Ugh. Couple what's happening in Eldoret with
the fact that the Kibaki government has issued a ban on live TV and radio broadcasts,
and information does seem to be one of the first victims of this sort of upheaval.
But information does seem to have some good things in its corner in Kenya,
namely some strong bloggers and other noteworthy attempts to use the Internet,
cell phones, and mashups between the two. Blogs like Mental
Acrobatics and Kenyan Pundit
are sharing gripping first and second-hand reports on what's going on in their
country; a blogger named Kui writing on KP had what I thought was a breathtaking
quote: "I feel naked in all this, stripped of many things that made me Kenyan."
The African blog aggregator and chat room hub Mashada
has been quite active. (There's even been a
fascinating discussion -- or, really, name-calling bout -- going on in various
threads over what effect what's happening in Kenya will have on Barack Obama's
presidential chances. Obama's even getting called a "kihii"
a lot -- a derogatory term used against Luos that that references a man's circumcision
status.) Of course, Global Voices is a great resource full
of Kenyan blogs.
But the big-pipe Internet access is by no means universal in Kenya. Access is spotty
and expensive where it does exist. (Research bleg: please send hard numbers
on Internet penetration in Kenya if you've got 'em.) People seem to have turned to more accessible technologies like SMS in recent days. White
African and other bloggers have been reporting that text messaging has been
widely used to informally communicate, and there
have been reports that mass
texting is being blocked. A blogging aide worker name Rob Rooker shares
texts from
either the government or his cell phone service "advising me not to
send hate messages inciting violence which are subject to prosecution and not
to take part in any unlawful assembly that may result in violence." And
some of the most interesting new projects, in my mind, are happening where the
web meets more accessible technologies like SMS. Kenya
IndyMedia is soliciting contributions of cell phone air time minutes to
free more people to SMS, and Mashada is taking in posts via
SMS. A particular neat new project is Ushahidi
-- Kiswahili for "witness" -- a Google Maps mashup which plots
lootings, killings, and other acts of violence sent in by either email or SMS
(+447624802635).
The Wire's Final Season: David Simon's Bleak Vision Meets the Age of Hope
The Wire is probably the one thing in the world I'm currently most obsessed with, and last night was the premiere of the show's fifth and final season. To mark the occasion, I've written up some thoughts over on the Huffington Post on how the show's grim new turn is a marked contrast to the hope fever sweeping the land.
My Year in Cities, 2007
I'm inspired my one of my favorite bloggers, Jason Kottke, and favorite writers, Steven Johnson, to write up my own list of the cities where I spent time this past year. It's funny -- thinking through where I've been while in the shower this morning reminded me that 2007 was a particularly odd, and home-bound, one. When I year began, I had just finished up as a staffer on Mark Warner's (pre-)presidential campaign. I started out the year doing some freelance projects, took a job blogging at Air America, left Air America, and am now back freelancing. It was, in truth, a little chaotic a year, but all in all a fantastic one.
With Jane still in law school, our personal travel has been minimal for the last couple of years. But we're planning a big passport-requiring trip for August, when she's done with the bar.
New York City
Jackson, MS
Missoula, MT
Baltimore, MD
Southampton, NY (4)
Chicago, IL (2)
Washington, DC
Saratoga Springs, NY
Amherst, MA
Philadelphia, PA (2)
Scranton, PA
New Orleans, LA
Monroeville, AL
Mobile, AL
San Diego, CA
Los Angeles, CA (2)
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
The Huckster: Selling the "FairTax" in New Hampshire
Oh, Mike Huckabee. Here we have a guitar-playin' Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor who authored a diet how-to under the brilliant title Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork and -- after beating the pants off of Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses -- gave a victory speech shoulder-to-shoulder with "Walker, Texas Ranger." He's sure gotta be one of the more *interesting* presidential candidates to come down the pike in quite a while, no?
Well, I did some digging, and it turns out that Huckabee's economic vision for America is appropriately colorful. The Huck's plan consists almost exclusively of repealing the 16th Amendment ("The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on income") and imposing an across-the-board 30% national tax on everything we eat, drink, buy (new), or otherwise consume. Over on AlterNet, I've taken a crack at looking at how the Huck's "FairTax" might play in tomorrow's primary in the "Live Free or Die" state. (Photo by Joe Crimmings. Thanks, Joe.)
Believing the Vote: On Electoral Faith in Kenya and Closer to Home
Waiting for the fun in Iowa to *finally* get underway last night, I couldn't help but fixate on the heartbreaking post-election mess in Kenya. I put together some thoughts for the Huffington Post attempting to connect the caucuses and the electoral failure in East Africa, a post that I was quite jazzed to see featured on the HuffPo politics homepage. (Woulda mentioned it here sooner, but I somehow managed to completely destroy nancyscola.com while nuking about 45,000 spam comments via MySql. Just finished a complete site rebuild, and all seems well.) Here's how that post begins:
As we come within mere hours of when the first Iowans will trudge into their caucus sites, the post-election horror engulfing Kenya puts the American presidential contest in sharp relief. The latest reports have upwards of 300 citizens killed. Yesterday's death-by-fire of 50 or so huddled in an Assemblies of God church near the Great Rift Valley city of Eldoret horrifyingly raises the specter of the 1994 Rwandan massacre of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the Catholic Church at Nyarubuye.
The Kenya violence, as you might know, is fueled by anger over a flawed presidential contest that resulted in the tenuous reelection of Mwai Kibaki. President Kibaki is a Kikuyu, the ethnic grouping that serves as Kenya's elite; importantly, Kenya's first post-independence leader Jomo Kenyatta was Kikuyu. Kibaki's main challenger, businessman Raila Odinga, is Luo. And the Rift Valley church attackers reportedly included a number of Kalenjin; former President Daniel Arap Moi is Kalenjin and, under his presidency, that grouping was among Kenya's most-favored peoples.
Sure, Kenya's deeply-carved ethnic fault lines were no doubt the tinder for this conflagration. But the match was the suspicion that Friday's election was less than free, fair, and deserving of honest faith.
Hope you'll give it a read.
And Here We Go
As much as I enjoyed the last two months ensconced in my fine Ikea reading chair -- and trust me, I really did relish it -- I'm now totally raring to get back into the world and start engaging. These "study months" were an experiment undertaken to build up some competence in a few areas that I plan to start writing about more. In particular, I wanted to get a better handle on (macro)economics, a topic that I never had much exposure to either in my culture anthropology-focused academic career or since. And so I took in and chewed over many of the classics, including those by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, F.A. Hayek, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kevin Phillips, Jeffrey Sachs, and others. It turns out that I was right, and that I really do enjoy considering the world through an economic lens. So that's nice.
You can't really ever stop learning, of course, and so my reading and studying will continue after today. But this re-engagement does mean several things. It means that I'll start showering and putting on grown-up pants more days of the week. And it means reaching out to all of the wonderful people whom I've kinda shrunk back from. But most importantly, it means that it's time to start hustling to find writing jobs and gigs. If you know of any, send word!
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