the art of the brand

last month’s wired mag had a satire on the fact that u can play “Scrabulous” at FaceBook,and employee a scrabble playing machine ap to max your scores. With a few more add-ons, your FaceBook account can be fullly automated, letting you check in once a day to see how you rank as a person. (That feature “see where you fit in” is already suggested by compare people ap).

Hasbro and Mattel, who control the intellectual property to Scrabble, want FaceBook to remove the ap. They don;t appear to be going after the makers of the ap, or for a share of the revenue that will no doubt come. Just shut it down.

At some point, brands realise there is no shutting down innovation. I look forward to the ghost of some Babylonian potter going after Hasbro on the basis that making tiles that convey signals interpretable as sounds, phonemes, messages, and placing them onto a grid to derive further meaning and value has always been the property of the Babylonians.

Hmmm. that might be a way to finance the rebuilding of Iraq….or..not.