Glaser on Scrabulous: "Silly" Split Rights For Scrabble Led To This

Rob Glaser, the CEO of RealNetworks ( NSDQ: RNWK), spoke last week at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, just hours before Hasbro filed a lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous, and assailed the rights issues associated with the game as the reason for this confusion in the market. The rights for Scrabble are complicated: Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, and Mattel in the rest of the world. RealNetworks has a digital deal with both companies, but Electronic Arts also has a digital deal with Hasbro.

Glaser said that the split IP for Scrabble was a clear example of old-fashioned boxed product firms unprepared for the global online marketplace, reports CasualGaming.biz. The "silly" split rights issue, Glaser explained, is currently what prevents a potential officially-sanctioned Scrabulous from existing as it prohibits global multiplayer gamers. He said: "The problem is that because of the rights, between Hasbro and Mattel, they don't let people from America play against people from England. There are these silly rules." He said Real is pushing for them to work this out and realize that the same rules don't apply in the physical space.

There were some previous reports that Real was interested in buying Scrabulous from the two Calcutta brothers. He said: "If we were able to put together the layer cake where everybody was happy?and there were a lot of everybody's in this case?sure it would have been great to buy Scrabulous. But at the same time if you can't get everybody aligned on a philosophy on how to work these things out, it would have been putting the cart before the horse."

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