Updated: Scrabulous & Hasbro & now Mattel
(Visited 6093 times) Game talk
Jan 152008
In the midst of an interesting article about article about Zynga, a cross-social-network casual games platform, I see this little paragraph describing an event I missed:
Last week, the Web site of Fortune magazine reported that the two brothers in India who created the game had received a legal notice from Hasbro, the toy company that owns the Scrabble brand. Hasbro did not return a request for comment, and Rajat Agarwalla, one of the brothers who created Scrabulous, said his lawyer had advised him not to comment on the matter.
Update: Reuters says that Mattel, which owns rights outside of the US and Canada, has also taken action.
10 Responses to “Updated: Scrabulous & Hasbro & now Mattel”
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AsRaph points out, Hasbro has finally threatened the creators of the immensely popular Scrabble knock off for Facebook, Scrabulous, with legal action. Hasbro is generally pretty protective of the Scrabble IP, so I’m surprised this took so long.
Oh no…I play 2-4 games of this a day with my fiancee. I have full respect for Hasbro and want to make sure that they are not cheated out of the use of their game if there is money being made here. I hope it gets worked out ok…
Now, if someone could send lawyers after the people who made Superpoke please. No questions asked…just throw them in a cell and throw away the key.
Mundinator wrote:
I gather that most people don’t realize that you can actually block Facebook applications.
Virtual games are the future, Hasbro! Physical board games take up my shelf space!
I wondered when this was going to happen. Hasbro has traditionally been pretty trigger happy on protecting the scrabble IP. I was wondering why they waited so long. Perhaps the developers being in India is part of it?
Wonder if it’s a coincidence that the mentioned it during the 60 minutes Zuckerberg story.
[…] Raph points out, Hasbro has finally threatened the creators of the immensely popular Scrabble knock off for […]
The problem Hasbro is going to have now, is that there are plenty of knock-offs on Facebook of Scrabble. Now they get to justify why they didn’t go after all of them, and just happen to of gone after the most popular of the versions.
Hasbro are enormously defensive of their IP, and they have a cause of action here as Scrabulous is blatantly infringing upon the Scrabble brand, both in name and appearance.
If they haven’t attacked knock-offs on Facebook, it’s likely because it’s below their radar and/or there’s no money to had from blocking this. 🙂
Best wishes!
(PS: I love the way your site previews comments in realtime – not seen that before!)
(I am not a lawyer)
To protect their trademarks, Hasbro (and anyone else), just has to move reasonably quickly to defend them. The main IP involved, I suspect, is the Scrabble trademark, not any copyright on the game rules (though that is possible as well).
Scrabulous looks like a pretty clear trademark infringement. They are pretty obviously trading on the Scrabble(TM) brand. The more interesting target would be Facebook, rather than the game developers… cuz that’s where the money is.
Trademarks require prompt (not Internet speed) action, copyrights don’t.
For copyright infringement, I would think a “take down” notice would be reasonable and require pretty prompt response.
The “fun” question for Facebook (and Metaplace?) is the extent to which the host site is re$pon$ible for the actions of developers on the service. The less involvement by the host site in approval (and revenues), the better.
It would not be surprising for these types of services to require an EIN or SSN and some statement about trademark, copyright, and patent infringement, to start being required to get hosted on these services (as well as some CYA statement about not being responsible for the actions of users yada yada).
Oh, and remember, these bets are off for things like child pornography where the hosting site has an affirmative responsibility (at least in the US) to do something about it.
Have to agree with Stence on this, the companies have to move to protect their IP otherwise the next time there’s an infringement they won’t have a strong case.
At first I thought they were shooting themselves in the foot. There are a few ‘Save Scrabulous’ communities on FBook and, at least by their own account, a good number of their members went out and bought the traditional board and tiles version of the game to lay with their family. But, with hindsight, yes, they are protecting their IP for the future.
Clamping down and having it pulled, well, that’s just going to breed resentment and, knowing how online communities tend to react, a fair chunk of it will be directed at Facebook for ‘allowing’ it to happen.
A win-win for everyone in this, the license owners, the developers, the Facebook community, would be for Hasbro / Mattel to agree to take the app in-house and use it as a marketing tool for the traditional board game.