Guy Debord, the Marxist and French philosopher who died in 1994, may be rolling over in his grave.
A lawyer representing his widow has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway said the lawyer sent him a letter demanding that he cease and desist from distributing his online war game, claiming it infringes on the copyright of the Debord estate. The philosopher had created a similar war game.
But copyrights and intellectual property were anathema to Debord, said Mr. Galloway. The Situationist International movement that Debord founded in 1957 is a mix of anarchism and Marxism. Its followers scrawled, "Abolish copyright" on building walls during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris.
The irony of defending the property rights of Debord, a Marxist, has not been lost on scholars, who have publicized the case on their blogs.
Mr. Galloway does not deny that the two-person computer game he developed is based on Debord's board game, the Game of War. Debord, who was an avid student of war strategy, released a few handcrafted copies of the board game in 1978. The goal of the game, which resembles chess, is to corner and destroy the opponents' pieces. Debord wrote a book about the game, with his wife, that was translated into English last year.
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