Desi Manifesto Blog: The Forum for South Asian American Men

[Blogger: S.I.] And by “we,” I mean Indians, and that includes the Scrabulous brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, pictured right. We finally got caught ripping off other people’s ideas and using them as our own. And I can say that it’s about time, and I’m not all that sorry to hear it.

All you Facebook users, were you surprised about the cease-and-desist orders? I’ve used Scrabulous quite a bit, and when I first saw the widget, I was shocked to find no affiliation to its corporate owners, Hasbro or Mattel. I then saw that it was a knockoff engineered by two Indos, and I figured it would get shut down sooner rather than later. That prediction wasn’t very bold, but per the letters in Facebook’s hot hands, it’s coming true, courtesy of corporate legal departments.

Look, I’m not trying to hate. I enjoy a round of Scrabulous, even if I had more than one game where I ended up with four piece-of-shit “I”s. I never quite realized how useless that letter is in Scrabble. I lost both those games.

But I also can’t justify blatantly ripping off someone else’s idea, applying absolutely no changes to it other than the name, and putting it up on a huge site where millions of users have access to it. Had they tweaked it, or used some tenets of Scrabble in creating their own game, or kept it to such a small audience that no one thought the better of it, then I would understand. But this was essentially selling users the online version of Scrabble, which exists in various forms already, and undercutting the owners along the way. I know the brothers Scrabulous didn’t actually sell the game, merely profiting from the ads. But it’s a market the parent corporations would logically explore, and they can’t afford to have their niche eroded.

As I’m in the entertainment industry, this is similar to one of the hangups of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and one of the many reasons they’re on strike. Their writing, in the form of TV shows and movies, can be downloaded on iTunes and other services, as well as viewed in streaming form on the networks’ own sites. And the writers don’t see any money but a few pennies for this. I support the writers, and the toy companies have essentially the same position now, though they are not the typical exploited victim.

The brothers have, however, managed to continue a viable Indian tradition: the rip off. Whether it’s every third Bollywood movie released or the pirating of US movies and music, India is notoriously “good” at taking a proven concept and acquiring it wholesale and free of cost, with as few adaptations as necessary. In a way, it’s one of the endearing qualities of the entertainment industry there. One classic example that you kiddies might not recognize, but the people closer to 30 certainly will, is the South Indian Tamil (I think) version of Michael Jackson’s hit, “Thriller.”

It’s true that almost every country outside the US imports American entertainment and culture, desired or not, and adapts it to its own norms in some way. And yes, America also takes parts of other cultures and turns them into trends and items at Gap. But I think Indians go that extra step of not going that extra step, keeping the original in as pure a form as possible. Sadly, the lack of effort when it comes to making movies of substance vs quick crappy films that will turn a buck is another straight-out-of-Hollywood habit, especially when you compare today’s films to the wonderful and meaningful cinema of India from the 60s and 70s. But I digress.

Maybe the Scrabulous boys will figure out a way to give the parent companies what they want while maintaining some kind of profit in the operation. I hope they saved some of that ad money though. It might be the last bit they see for a while. For now, at least, the widget continues on as though nothing has happened.

But if they took such pains to copy the game from scratch, I think they might also be creative enough to think of something new. The stuff we Indians think of when we’re creating, rather than copying, can be quite spectacular.

UPDATE: While the app remained up on Facebook for some time, it looks like the lawyers are cracking down. Not sure when the app will be taken offline though.