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.
This assumes it's validly copyrighted.
I wonder if the wordlist is even registered with the copyright office (I can't imagine it is, they are pretty good about not accepting stuff like this).
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.
The fact that the DMCA could criminalize the act of inspecting the contents of an executeable file acquired legally and running on your personal computer and then telling other people about it is pretty good evidence that the DMCA is an immoral law that should be violated as much as possible. Kudos to the article's author.
It is sometimes surprising how accurate some of Stallman's dystopian visions were and it is frightening because some of them have not become true. Yet.
The article probably does violate that section of the DMCA. But it is also a research/scientific piece subject to the protection of the First Amendment. I could be mistaken, but I suspect if one or the other had to go -- the First Amendment or this law -- the First Amendment would win.
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.
That would presume that the dictionary in question was a copyrightable work. The US has weak database copyright protection due to Feist. There is also Assessment Technologies to consider, but I don't believe that involved the DMCA.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201