Do you Facebook?
By: Mr JM
Facebook is one of those internet things that, with twenty-twenty hindsight, seems an obvious candidate for popularity. But when it first started, a lot of us looked at the security issues and figured the jeopardy of putting so much personal information out there for the world to see might kill it off.
A lot of us also wish we’d had the good sense to invest in Facebook.
Do you play Scrabble? Around the world a lot of people enjoy the game. On Facebook there are something of the order of fifty thousand users who like Scrabble and most of them preferred the version on Facebook called Scrabulous.
Mattel, the company that produces the real-world version of Scrabble, decided that Scrabulous was somehow interfering with their profits. Nobody is quite sure how this might be so – many of the Scrabulous users already own a physical game of Scrabble and virtually all those they play against they would never otherwise get to see over a physical board.
But Mattel decided to take Facebook to a court in India to force them to remove the Scrabulous game from the site. Why India? Obviously they figured they could get a better chance of success in India. Even so, the Indian court reserved a decision – translates as ‘decided not to make a decision’ but Mattel went ahead and served Facebook with a take-down order anyway.
Facebook, without so much as a ‘by your leave’ or word of explanation, removed Scrabulous. Fifty thousand fans are left with no games, no stats and no recourse.
Yet again a Corporation says ‘eff you’ to those who provide their profits.
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