Isn't this a violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention section? This seems to be explicitly describing how to circumvent protection measures for a copyrighted work.
Additionally, to the degree that hasbro/whoever the heck claims a copyright on the work of other people, they are themselves violating various parts of the DMCA dealing with rights management info, etc.
Hasbro/whoever should know that it is not possible to effect a transfer of copyright without an explicit signed agreement. Thus, if all these people contributed, and then they slapped a copyright on it, they own exactly nothing.
(There is such a thing as a compilation copyright, but it it is a very minimalistic copyright, and assumes they actually did anything creative or original to the compiled list)
If someone was to press this point against the scrabble players, they would A. likely lose as the list will be considered non-copyrightable subject matter B. If the list was somehow found copyrightable, and this story is accurate, they would be opening themselves up to copyright infringement lawsuits from the scrabble players who contributed to the wordlist.
So they kinda lose either way.
Said another way, even as a very pro-copyright judge, I would have a hard time saying the author did not have a First Amendment right to publish his research. Now if he wrote a program to make it easy to crack these databases and sold it for $5 each, that would be a different matter.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Perhaps if they want more people to know they can file a takedown request.