It's hard to really know how many cheaters are actually caught taking shortcuts. Generally, people assume that the ones who get caught are representative of all cheaters -- but maybe the smart cheaters are never caught... and really do prosper. Here are just a few known cheaters... and not all of them have faced up to any consequences.

• South African Olympian Cameron van der Burgh set a world record in the men's 100-meter breaststroke (and won a gold medal), but later he admitted to using more dolphin kicks than are officially allowed. He's not the only one doing it, but that doesn't make it right (just like peeing in the pool). [url]
• In the UK, Charles Ingram cheated "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" with a simple system of having his wife cough at the correct answers. Ingram and his accomplices were found guilty of cheating by a jury, but maybe if they'd used a slightly less obvious audible system... [url]
• The 2012 National Scrabble Championship was marred by a boy caught palming blank tiles. Cheating at Scrabble is considered such a rare event that a fake wunderkind caught red handed made national news. [url]
• Surprise: students enrolled in online classes with Coursera have been found cheating with dozens of cases of alleged plagiarism. Students don't (currently) earn any real credits from these classes, but that will likely change someday. So when more online classes actually have value, there will be far more than a few dozen cheaters. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Studying people's brains could someday lead to understanding how our minds work. But so far, we're still a long way away from figuring out what makes our brains tick. Here are just a few more interesting links on the topic of brain research.

• Brain imaging techniques could be used to create more effective psychological treatments -- without drugs. Apparently, social anxiety can be significantly reduced with meditation and MRI scans, and the combination produces measurable changes in brain activity. [url]
• Competitive Scrabble players seem to have better visual recognition of words -- duh! A study of expert Scrabble players versus a couple dozen non-experts demonstrates that people can train their brains to develop impressive visual word recognition skills, even as adults. [url]
• There might still be time to add a few books to the end of your summer reading list. These are books. [crack open one.] This is your brain on books. [url]
• To discover more interesting articles on the human mind, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

As you recall, Hasbro's decisions on how to deal with upstart Scrabulous backfired badly. The company first threatened Scrabulous, then tried to do a deal with them. When that failed it (finally!) built its own Facebook Scrabble and then sued Scrabulous. Rather than working to Hasbro's advantage, this backfired in a huge way -- pissing off plenty of people who swore never to use Hasbro's version of the game. And then it was just a matter of days until the Scrabulous guys came out with a new game that was close to Scrabble, but different enough to likely avoid all copyright and trademark claims.

Now, Hasbro only owns the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada. Mattel owns the rights elsewhere. Now, seeing that Mattel had the distinct advantage of seeing how much backlash there was against Hasbro for its actions, and how poorly Hasbro's own Facebook Scrabble was received, you might think that Mattel would try a different path. Nope. Mattel has now forced Scrabulous offline outside of the US as well. To be fair, the guys from Scrabulous overplay their reaction as well. It's not that shocking. After all, this is how companies react these days. Rather than going with the faux outrage, why not just release WordScraper and get people to sign up for that, rather than any "licensed" version of Scrabble?

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Following Hasbro's decision to finally actually sue over Scrabulous (though, of course, it waited until it had its own competing game first), the guys behind Scrabulous have shut off access to the game on Facebook for users in the US and Canada. Outside of those countries you can still play it -- or you can go directly to the Scrabulous website itself. Or, of course, you can go use Hasbro's version of Scrabble, though, as the report notes, it doesn't seem to be working very well. And, without any competition, Hasbro doesn't have that much incentive to make sure it gets much better.

For months, Hasbro and Mattel had been threatening the makers of Scrabulous with a lawsuit for daring to do what the gaming companies had been unwilling to do: make a fun version of Scrabble available on Facebook in a way that got many people playing the game on a regular basis. It took nearly 9 months, but Hasbro finally put a version of Scrabble on Facebook itself, and now that it's up has finally officially filed the lawsuit.

It's rather telling that Hasbro waited until its own version was online to file the lawsuit. What the company is basically admitting is that Scrabulous was a great promotional vehicle for Scrabble (otherwise why leave it up?), but now that Hasbro is competing with Scrabulous online, it wants to cut out that competition. Hasbro's General Counsel is being quite misleading in saying: "Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties." That's not quite true. There is no "obligation" to sue someone who made your game popular again just because you were late to the game.

Scrabulous showed Hasbro that there was a huge market for their game. There was no indication that Hasbro had any interest in Scrabble for Facebook prior to Scrabulous' success.

Then there's this bizarre quote from Hasbro's GM of digital initiatives: "Hasbro has always had the same two priorities. One is to offer a great playing authentic game for fans and the second is to protect our intellectual property. This was theft of I.P., plain and simple." Really? Your second biggest priority is to protect your IP? Then why did you wait all this time to sue? Clearly there was a benefit in leaving Scrabulous up while your own version was being developed. Clearly the comparison to "theft" is incorrect. No one would let "theft" go on for months on end before suing, just so they could create their own competitive offering.

The Scrabulous/Hasbro situation is a perfect example of Matt Mason's thesis that "piracy" is almost never about "theft." It's almost always a market indicator that the market is unhappy with what's being offered. It's the market showing companies what they want.

In the ongoing saga of Scrabulous, the unauthorized online version of Scrabble that has found many fans on Facebook but has upset Mattel and Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble), it appears that RealNetworks and Mattel have finally put out an official version of Scrabble for Facebook -- but the problem is that it's terrible. As the NY Times reports, "Facebook Scrabble takes a long time to load, does not always quickly update to show recent moves, and the words the game will accept do not reflect standard Scrabble dictionaries, or even the English language." While it's nice to see that Scrabulous still hasn't been forced offline, it seems odd that the authorized version is so terrible. It still probably would have made the most sense to just do a deal with the brothers who created Scrabulous (and there are still rumors that a deal has been discussed, but without a decent resolution), but if that doesn't work, the way to compete is with a better product. Putting out a product that's not very good isn't likely to win over many fans.

Back in January, we explored the news that both Hasbro and Mattel (who own the rights to the board game Scrabble in different regions) were upset and threatening to sue about the incredibly popular knockoff version Scrabulous on Facebook. As we pointed out at the time, shutting down the game would quickly piss off 2.3 million Scrabble fans -- many of whom were interested in the game for the first time, most likely leading to real sales of the board game. While the situation still has not been resolved (and Scrabulous remains online), the New York Times has the latest details that suggest that Real Networks is negotiating with Scrabulous' creators. Since Real has a deal to produce an online version of Scrabble (the article first says the deal is with Hasbro, and later says it's with Mattel, so it's not clear who the deal is with), perhaps this will all be worked out for the best. However, the article does mention that executives from Mattel are against the idea of settling with the creators of Scrabulous, fearing that it "would set a bad precedent."

That's lawyers speaking, not marketers. How could a fun online game that has rejuvenated interest in what was seen as a rather dull board game among many folks today, be considered a "bad precedent?" How could having millions of new fans of your game and treating them right, rather than depriving them of what they want be considered a "bad precedent?" Some may answer that the "bad precedent" would be that it would encourage others to create similar knockoffs of other Mattel games, but, again, if they drove as much interest in the originals as Scrabulous did, isn't that a good thing? Some may claim that it would deprive Mattel the opportunity to license the games for lots of money, but again looking at Scrabble as an example, the bigger fear for Mattel should have been the fact that many people didn't care about the game at all. By letting random people create the games for it, it can quickly determine which games work well online and then work with the creators of those games to put an official stamp on it. The Agarwalla brothers created this game at no cost to Mattel, who otherwise would have spent a ton of money to create it after which it might not have caught on in the same way Scrabulous did. This way the game has been created, tested and even built up an audience at no cost to Mattel. Shouldn't they consider that to be a good thing?

It was only a matter of time before super-popular office productivity killer, Scrabulous, was sued by Hasbro for infringing upon the Scrabble trademark. A shutdown notice was sent two weeks ago, although, as of right now, Scrabulous is still operational (hurry up and finish up your games). Founded in 2006 as a standalone website by two Indian brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, Scrabulous' growth accelerated significantly when it launched as an application for Facebook. As the 9th most popular application on Facebook, Scrabulous boasts over 2.3 million active users with over 500,000 of them active daily. While Hasbro does indeed have a strong legal case against the Agarwalla brothers, they are missing out on a key opportunity by pursuing this litigious route. Although Hasbro recently licensed the digital rights of its games to EA, no online version of Scrabble exists right now. So, by shutting down Scrabulous, Hasbro would be angering 2.3 million of Scrabble's biggest fans. Instead, why not hammer out a compromise and turn this into a win-win-win situation? Unfortunately, most likely, history will repeat itself, as this is not the first time Hasbro has chosen this route -- in 2005, they shut down popular online Scrabble site, e-scrabble.