Leader Watch: How Medvedev Got More Popular Than His Boss, Putin

New Media: The Scrabulous Scrap
In mid-January, when Scrabble co-owners Hasbro and Mattel sent a cease-and-desist order to the makers of Facebook's Scrabulous—the word game that ranks as one of the social-networking site's most popular applications, with 600,000 users daily—online fans panicked. "Save Scrabulous" groups (encompassing close to 47,600 members) protested the shutdown and threatened boycotts. "Hasbro and Mattel are wringing their own necks," one user declared.

Legal experts say that the case against Scrabulous's inventors is hardly open and shut. According to Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford Internet scholar, Scrabulous might be able to keep the game if it changes certain features, like the name and the physical board. But the more important point concerns Hasbro and Mattel, which seem to be following the path of other industries (like music and newspapers) that have tried to defend closed, for-pay business models in the open world of the Internet, and largely failed.

Now the game makers—who also own favorites Monopoly, Clue and Risk—are under intense pressure to play catch-up with emerging Web technologies, says Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This is a fantastic new market that's been developed for free. Hasbro should look to capitalize on this while they have the opportunity, before other copycats arrive."
—Katie Baker

Fast Chat: Zero-Gravity Travel
Billionaire Richard Branson and aerospace designer Burt Rutan have unveiled SpaceShipTwo, the world's first tourist spaceship. They plan to put the craft on trial later this year, with tickets going for $200,000 a head. NEWSWEEK's Jacqui Goddard talks to former NASA engineer and "Rocket Boys" author Homer Hickam about the final frontier for tourism.

Goddard: How big a deal is SpaceShipTwo?
Hickam: It may be the only game in town for private space travelers since it looks like the Russians are going to get out of the space-tourist business in favor of flying NASA astronauts, who will soon lack the ability to go on an American ship. [The space-shuttle program is set to end in 2010.]

How safe is this thing?
It should be very safe. There really isn't much in the way of unproven technology about it, with the exception of the composite materials used for its construction. No one knows how these materials will hold up over many flights, but computer models look good.