Scrabble clone: Hasbro sues Facebook
Hasbro, the owner of Scrabble filed suit Thursday against the developers of Scrabulous, a word game played by millions of Facebook users each month. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property,” said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel. Hasbro also sent a letter to Facebook asking the social networking site to shut down Scrabulous. As of noon Pacific time Thursday, the game was still up. Filed in the Southern District of New York federal court, the suit against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla and their company, RJ Softwares, claims copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
This month Hasbro introduced a beta version of its official Scrabble game on Facebook. Developed by Electronic Arts Inc., the game is slated to be available to all Facebook members next month. “We want to give Scrabble fans a legitimate way to play the game,” said Mark Blecher, Hasbro’s general manager of digital media and gaming. So far players have ruled in favor of Scrabulous. Scrabble counted 8,862 active Facebook players Thursday, and Scrabulous had 512,961. Blecher said the match hadn’t really begun, given that Scrabble was still in beta.
Source: LA Times
Comments(16)
frankly, i haven’t played scrabble before
Well of course Facebook took the idea of Scrabble – but the difference is, they developed it themselves. I’m not a lawyer, but if new copyright laws mean that people cannot even copy IDEAS and implement them in new ways, then we are all screwed.
…saying that, why isn’t the inventor of the crossword puzzle or wordsearch suing everybody?
Damn these stupid letters…
d y s l e x i c
Rlslog staff: FFS will you DO SOMETHING about all the idiots who post off-topic posts? Look at this thread – 80% of the comments already are off topic. Ironically, including this one! But for good reason!
… Thank you, staff
It’s 10 minutes to implement scrabble. if you have a dictionary file.
+ 10 mins to do the server part.
ya, ok mr. super-programmer. Go create an online multiplayer scrabble game in 20 minutes. I’ll be right here.
i have to say:
CORRECT!
Hasbro sues Facebook
Facebook sues Studivz
I’ve personally met the creators (brothers) of Scrabolous. It’s a nice game & they are really fine blokes. This drama has been going on for months. I give a damn about Hasbro and their sh!t of an alternative. For me Scrabolous is the real thing. Scrabolous is better IMO, all these FB users can’t be wrong.
You have to admit that Scrabolous is a blatant ripoff of Scrabble.
Regarding copyright law, its way too similar. Its not like Amazon’s 1 click patent where its so basic, that anyone could make it on accident.
This is like a band making millions off a cover song without paying royalty fees. And the people behind Scrabolous are making millions.
You can only copyright the graphics and text explanations in board games.
All they had to do was change the graphics, change the triple word text etc and called it The Facebook Wordgame, and Hasbro wouldn’t have had an argument.
wordbiz kicks scrabulous’s butt as an online scrabble client anywayz
ok i have a great idea ill copyright farts and everytime one farts ill sue them
hasbro should also sue that jerk who made a very poor copy of boggle on facebook. he just changed the name but stole the features of the official boggle game blatantly, just to make money.
The problem is that IP law as it stands is rewarding “firstness” rather than quality. Scrabulous is clearly significantly better than anything Hasbro has ever produced. If it fails, the users suffer.