Mattel to Sell Off CyberPatrol

Spud Zeppelin writes "According to this article at The Motley Fool, Mattel is looking to sell its Learning Company software division for a substantial loss compared to what the company paid to acquire it. Among Learning Company's products is the recently controversial censorware product CyberPatrol." According to the Fool, the business "racked up big losses, driving the stock near its 52-week low and contributing to the resignation of Jill Barad, the company's former chairwoman and chief executive." This software seems not very profitable in the consumer market.

Hey, moderator!

[unitron]

Would the moderator who marked the above "redundant" please point out where someone else disagreed with the original poster about the educational value of broken glass before I did.

Redundant, in discourse, means unnecessarily repetitious.
It does not mean irrelevant. If you think a post irrelevant, moderate it as off-topic.

People who go into a 2 day old thread with a total of 8 posts just to find something to moderate down make me wonder.

Someone got wise at Mattel

[Gothland]

What they got wise to is another question. Did they figure out that cracks were bound to happen, and nothing they could do would get around that? Did they determine that they had created enough of a PR monster by suing (sp?), then blocking related sites, that they had no choice but to disassociate themselves? Or did they have a moral change of heart, and come to understand that they and parents were not doing kids any favours by saying "The Internet is Dangerous", "Sex is bad", and more importantly "I have the right to control what you can see, what you know, and by extension, what you think."

Probably not the third, but the end result is similar. I'll take it.

Any number of reasons...

[Anonymous Coward]

All things considered, I have to say that Mattel probably isn't doing this specifically over the CPHack thing. It's definitely a *contributing* factor, but it doesn't account for everything.

Look at Mattel's product line ( http://www.mattel.com/ ) Their biggest area of "educational" toys happens to be "Fisher Price", and that's mostly because you can call just about *anything* educational when you're giving it to an infant or a toddler (well, okay, maybe not broken glass, but I've seen people call teddy bears "educational". It's meaningless at that age, really-- parents are the primary educators, not toys.)

But seriously, Mattel is known for Barbie. Cabbage Patch Kids. Matchbox. Hotweels.

In other words, the "fun without the bullshit 'educational' pretense" type of toys.

It hurts their image to have boring programs out there. I mean, I got a kick out of "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego" on my old 286 with 512K of RAM. But I never enjoyed shit like "Mario Teaches Typing". Or "Math Blaster". Or anything along those lines. MTT is probably the best example-- Mario was just like my sadistic fucking instructor. "Do a drill! Now! Faster! Are you some kind of half-wit?!"

So what happens when a kid sees the word "Mattel" attached to "Boring Instructional Crap v1.0"? He gets a bad taste in his mouth for Mattel. Hell, I probably would, too.

And having a pop-up box that says "You can't go here, it's blocked. [(C) 1999 Mattel Inc.]" on a site that has been *unfairly* blocked is a death wish.

Mattel was never cut out for educational stuff-- it's too difficult to make educational toys that don't have stupid pretenses. And Mattel has always been a company to make *fun* toys. The match wasn't exactly made in heaven to begin with, you know?

Frightening Possibility

[raygundan]

It's nice to see that Mattel has realized there isn't any profit in a Censorware package that doesn't really censor much, but which does block dozens of legitimate sites.

The frightening part of all this, though is this quote:

The Journal listed the prospective buyers as Vivendi SA's Havas Interactive
Inc., Internet incubator Knowledge Universe LLC, Microsoft Corp., Time Warner
Inc. and Infogrames Entertainment SA.

I'm more than a little concerned that Time Warner and Microsoft are listed as potential buyers. These companies aren't exactly on my list of conscientious companies, and it seems unlikely that they will put the incredible effort into CyberPatrol to keep its lists fair and up-to-date. The effort required to maintain censorware that is up-to-date and fair is nearly unattainable, due to the size of the internet. Although I'm happy Mattel has decided it is not profitable, I would be much happier if the project were just scuttled altogether in light of its inherent weaknesses and the near-impossibility of maintaining the block lists.

If you want to help...

[JackBryar]

Last week I posted an article on andovernews
http://www.andovernews.com/cgi-bin/news_column.p l?543 that may be of some interest to anyone trying to figure out who to contact at Mattel about dumping CP.

The board member most likely to be responsive to thoughtful, well crafted letters is Mark Wiles, the CEO of the Times Mirror Company. He is likely to be the best person inside Mattel to argue the relevant issues of intellectual freedom. I posted contact information on Andovernews.

The other relevant organization within Mattel is called MIMCO. It's a internal ethics and standards organization inside the company, and one with real teeth. Dr. Prakash Sethi, the anti-apartheid activist, and Professor Murray Weidenbaum of Washington University are prominent members. Again, contact information is included in the article.

I plead with you all to make sure that your notes are thoughtful and well considered. I'm confident they will be heard.

Jack Bryar

Don't pat yourselves on the back too hard

[rgmoore]

While anti-censorship forces can certainly be happy that Mattel is dumping Learning Company, they should realize that it probably has nothing whatsoever to do with CyperPatrol. The Learning Company has suffered from a number of management mistakes and bad business, which is what led to their being bought out by Mattel in the first place, and that has a lot more to do with it. It looks very much as though Mattel has simply decided that they aren't going to fix those problems, and that they really aren't getting the kind of corporate synergy (read: expanding their name into computer games) that they were hoping for. CP is probably less than 1% of their reason for doing this.

Not sure about getting wise.

[www.sorehands.com]

Mattel has been going after Barbie Benson for her website Barbie's Sin Circus [barbiebenson.com] claiming trademark infringement and dilution. (or at least what I was told). And to keep the purity of the Barbie name.

This is the same argument that they used in the Barbie Girl lawsuit.

A laugh with Mattel.

[www.sorehands.com]

I don't know if Mattel realized this, but they bought my lawsuit to keep.

Even if Mattel sells TLC (the Learning Company), since they continued with the lawsuit while they were in control, they not only took liability, but they committed violations of the law themself.

Now, when the sell TLC, they sell a part of the lawsuit to the new buyers, but still keep liability themself.