Do you feel that Hasbro’s lawsuit against Scrabulous was rather heavy-handed? Did you enjoy Scrabulous’s revival of a 60-year-old game, and do you resent Hasbro’s free-riding off of the innovators who made Scrabulous? Is it uncool that Hasbro used Scrabulous to make Scrabble more popular, and then sued the Scrabulous developers once Hasbro developed an official Facebook app?

Then perhaps it is time that you began boycotting Hasbro’s Scrabble, in all its forms. Why not:

• Refuse to use official Scrabble online games - Let’s face it, they’re not as good as Scrabulous was, anyway. You can join the Facebook group We refuse to use official Scrabble app since Hasbro shut down Scrabulous or probably a dozen others like it.
• Continue playing Scrabulous anyway – Hasbro does not own the copyrights to Scrabble outside the USA and Canada, some other company does. So, if you connect to Facebook from an IP address located outside the US and Canada, then you can continue playing Scrabulous just like the good old days. This Facebook group has easy instructions on how to do so, by connecting to Facebook through a proxy server. A silver lining to this lawsuit might be getting more people using the Firefox web browser and the FoxyProxy add-on.
• Avoid buying products from Hasbro – Do you really need a new Scrabble board? Aren’t there a gazillion Scrabble boards floating around people’s attics and garage sales that you could pick up for a song? Same thing goes for other Hasbro games! Exercise your first sale rights and buy used games instead.
• If you have a Scrabble board, don’t play Scrabble on it, play a different word game - What’s so good about the exact copyrighted version of Scrabble anyway? The Scrabulous developers realized this and released the more flexible Wordscraper, a Scrabble-esque game that lets you change the board/rules. If you have a physical Scrabble board, there are innumerable word games you could play with it. You could use the tiles to play Anagrams, a lovely fast-paced party game that predates Scrabble, or perhaps even Bananagrams. Or, create your own entirely new word game, and go down in history as the inventor of something even better than Scrabble!
• Make your own Scrabble-esque boards - Why buy it when you can make it yourself? The tiles might be a bit tricky (although a RepRap 3d printer would probably make short work of it once it’s generally available to the public) but it should be child’s play to draw a grid and fill in the boxes with double word scores or more interesting variations.

Honestly, Hasbro’s rent-seeking with the Scrabble copyright is a really annoying example of how copyright can hinder creativity rather than encouraging it. Scrabble was invented in 1938, and sold by the creator in 1948 to someone who could commercialize it (not Hasbro, Hasbro bought the copyright much later around 1986). How much real innovation has been done since then with Scrabble by people who benefit from the copyright royalties? Isn’t it telling that the innovators here innovated without benefiting from copyright controls or copyright royalties? This is a clear case of copyright outlasting its usefulness. Perhaps more importantly, I think it’s rotten that Hasbro is shutting down Scrabulous for bringing Scrabble to life again for a new generation… that’s not a proper reward. I’d love to send a message to Hasbro that their behavior is really uncool. Just because Hasbro has the legal power to shut down Scrabulous doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, either for their bottom line (see the Economist’s cautious endorsement of piracy) or for creativity in the field of gaming.

During my time interning at SPARC this summer, I’ve been working on getting them involved with online video in a free culture compatible fashion. In an effort to make sure they remain ideologically pure and practically well-guided, I’ve written up a “best practices for online video” document for them (republished below) which contains all of the goals I think an organization should pursue when creating/publishing/using video online.

What do you folks think? Anything I missed? Anything you disagree with? If other SFC members and the Internet at large agree that these are good practices that SFC should follow, perhaps this could be adopted as an official SFC document?

Best Practices for Online Video

• Exercise your fair use rights - If you don’t use it, you lose it! When you need to quote something or reference something, do it, don’t be scared. Just follow the Center for Social Media’s “Code of Best Practices in Fair use for Online Video“.
• Open content licenses - Make it obviously legal to share, cut up and remix your content. Use a Creative Commons license that allows for remixing. (All current CC licenses allow for sharing, at least for noncommercial purposes.)
• Encourage remixing - Provide a copy of the video in an uncompressed, unedited form somewhere. This can make it easier for people to reuse your content in future projects.
• Provide a copy in an open video format - Use the Ogg Theora video format! It’s an open standard, meaning we know exactly how it works, and it is not patent-encumbered, meaning we don’t know of any patents that would prevent you from using it however you want, and nobody can force you or anyone else to pay royalties for the “privilege” of using the format. See Xiph.org’s page on Theora’s benefits and why Ogg Theora matters for internet TV. Blip.tv allows you to upload in Ogg Theora and it will attempt to play Theora videos in your browser using the Cortado java video applet (see the Inquirer article on this).
• Provide multiple formats - That said, you should try to provide as many video formats as practical. Give people options, in case they have trouble playing or using one or more of your formats. Just make sure one of those options is always an open format.
• Open source video editing – When possible, capture and edit your videos with open source tools, and promote those tools to others. Unfortunately, it is currently difficult to do FOSS video editing on Mac OS X. It is slightly easier to do it on Linux with tools such as Kdenlive, Kino, and Cinelerra, and Linux distributions dedicated to working with multimedia such as Ubuntu Studio. Also, the next version of VLC media player, 0.9, is expected to make it easy to do screencasting / screen capturing on any platform, with a nice GUI / wizard to walk you through the process.
• Open source media server - Use open source software to serve up your video. This is easy if you are video podcasting: any blogging software that produces a web feed with enclosures will do, such as Wordpress. In fact, with Wordpress, all you have to do is link to your video file in a format WordPress knows about (MP3 and MP4, from quick testing).  This automatically packages the video in an enclosure in your RSS feed so that anyone with a smart feed reader can automatically download the video. The Podpress plugin for Wordpress should make this even easier. An open source media server for streaming video can be a bit more complex. The option I am helping SPARC pursue at the moment is ePresence, an apparently mature open source project which unfortunately requires a Windows computer at the moment, but which is supposed to be migrating to Linux in the distant future.
• Open source client - People should be able to view the video using 100% open source software, and you should encourage them to do so. Miro, a free / open source internet tv and video player, is great for podcasting. As for streaming media, just make sure it plays in VLC.
• Offer a downloadable format - Sometimes people want to access video while not connected to the Internet. Offering a download link lets people with slow connections watch your high resolution video through the power of delayed gratification. Also, letting people download your stuff aids distributed preservation.
• Decentralized distribution system - Services like Youtube offer convenience, but we at Students for Free Culture believe any one player monopolizing video distribution is bad. It’s good to preserve options of self-hosting and self-aggregating available, and to use them in parallel with other distribution methods.
• Redundancy and long-term preservation - Post your video to multiple locations so if one goes down it will still be available. Be especially sure to use the Internet Archive, as that is meant for long-term preservation. (Blip.tv will crossload video to the Internet Archive for you.)
• Provide good metadata - Tags and other descriptors can make it easier for people to find your video. Thumbnails can make it easier to skim through your content (automatically provided by Internet Archive). Categorize! Annotate!
• Write out a transcript - Gives you more googlejuice / makes your site more attractive to search engines! Also more accessible for the disabled.
• Provide feeds and other ways to subscribe to your content - If people like what you have, make it easy for them to get further updates.
• Bookmarking / social networking / embedding - make it easy for people to save the location of a video, and to share it with others. Naturally, try to support open source tools when possible, such as the Connotea scholarly bookmarking software.
• UPDATE: Film in the highest quality possible, and compress for the web later - Do not film in low-resolution with a mediocre camera simply because Youtube videos are typically low-resolution. First of all, High Definition video is slowly gaining in popularity on the web, as bandwidth and storage become cheaper and screens get bigger and higher-density pixelwise. Distribution platforms like Miro make it easy for even people with sluggish internet connections to enjoy HD video, since Miro and other podcasting software can download content when you are not around (e.g. when you are sleeping) and serve it to you later. Although you will want a low-res version for people with slower internet connections, you should also publish an HD version for those early adopters on the cutting edge. Second of all, you can reduce the quality of your video by compressing it or reducing the resolution (e.g. by digitally zooming in on a person’s face) whenever you like, but it is impossible to increase your video to a higher resolution if you did not record a high-resolution version. Capture the best video you can, and compress it later to make the file size small enough to fit through the Intertubes.

UPDATE: For more suggestions and information on creating online video, check out Make Internet TV.

We will be having an online meeting of all Students for Free Culture chapters this Sunday, July 27, at 8pm EDT [see the fixed time around the world], in our IRC channel #freeculture at irc.freenode.net. If you are a member of a chapter, we want you to attend! Bring your free culture friends along :)

Check out the agenda for the meeting on our wiki, if you want to know what we will be talking about, or even add items to the agenda yourself :)

If you don’t know what IRC is, check out our IRC wiki page, or just click on the Mibbit widget below to go directly to our IRC chat room!

Students for Free Culture is co-sponsoring the 2008 Sparky Awards, which asks people to make a short video to illustrate the value of information sharing. The first place winner will get a Sparky statuette and $1,000, and there will be some nifty prizes for the runners-up as well. The official list of judges isn’t up yet, but Rich Jones from our Boston University chapter will be one of the judges, and hopefully our chapter members will create some fabulous entries! The winners from last year were pretty excellent (personally I’m partial to “Pri Vetai: Private Eye”), and I’m looking forward to seeing more creative videos about the importance of open access to information :) Just make sure to get your entry in by the deadline of November 30th, 2008!

If you want to help promote the video contest, you can find some useful materials in the downloads section on the Sparky Awards site, or you could share this promotional video that I threw together:

If you want to download the promo video, you can try grabbing the Ogg Theora version or mp4. Enjoy!

Save the date!

Students for Free Culture Conference 2008

October 11 and 12
Berkeley, CA

Lots and lots of work to be done between now and then but it’s exciting to have a date and a location! (Especially one that is not in the Northeast US!)

We are currently raising money to fly out as many people as possible. Any ideas for funding sources are deeply appreciated!