Hasbro Sues Scrabulous For Being Too Scrabble-ish
from the triple-word-score dept
It was only a matter of time before super-popular office productivity killer, Scrabulous, was sued by Hasbro for infringing upon the Scrabble trademark. A shutdown notice was sent two weeks ago, although, as of right now, Scrabulous is still operational (hurry up and finish up your games). Founded in 2006 as a standalone website by two Indian brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, Scrabulous' growth accelerated significantly when it launched as an application for Facebook. As the 9th most popular application on Facebook, Scrabulous boasts over 2.3 million active users with over 500,000 of them active daily. While Hasbro does indeed have a strong legal case against the Agarwalla brothers, they are missing out on a key opportunity by pursuing this litigious route. Although Hasbro recently licensed the digital rights of its games to EA, no online version of Scrabble exists right now. So, by shutting down Scrabulous, Hasbro would be angering 2.3 million of Scrabble's biggest fans. Instead, why not hammer out a compromise and turn this into a win-win-win situation? Unfortunately, most likely, history will repeat itself, as this is not the first time Hasbro has chosen this route -- in 2005, they shut down popular online Scrabble site, e-scrabble.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: facebook, scrabble, scrabulous
Companies: facebook, hasbro
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Online Scrabble Games
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Re: Online Scrabble Games
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Re: Online Scrabble Games
have you played scrabulous?
no comparison
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Re: Online Scrabble Games
Thanks,
Sharon
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Re: Lawyers
Scrabulous is a very good online version of scrabble. If it needs to be licensed in some way, both Hasbro and the Scrabulous people can benefit from making it "official". Scrabulous has a huge user base, and has contributed significantly to an upturn in sales of Scrabble sets. Hasbro should be grateful, and should be very careful to avoid styling themselves aggressive and unpleasant over this, in my view. 'Cos lost customers have long memories.
Hasbro didn't invent Scrabble - that was an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938, it was first called Scrabble by one James Brunot in 1948, and it was picked up by Macy's in '52, the rights passing to Selchow and Richter in that year.
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Spin-off Sales
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Re: Spin-off Sales
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Hasbro almost certainly has a good case for copyright infringement, but for the sake of good customer relations with all the millions of Scrabulous users who probably are currently Hasbro customers for the physical Scrabble game and other games, it would make so much sense for them to make the Scrabulous developers an offer they can't refuse and keep them on as well paid employees - of EA if necessary. This will be best for Hasbro's bottom line since they will retain the advertising revenue from the huge user base and the enormous customer base for future offerings these great developers they could come up with based on Hasbro's game catalog.
Shutting down Scrabulous will create a big backlash against Hasbro - I for one will probably boycott buying from them in future. I will certainly not be interested in paying for the right to use an 'official' online version or purchasing any new off the shelf software.
Hasbro needs to do some careful thinking and market analysis.
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Re:
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Re:
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by win-win you mean
I will refrain from the usual rant on how broken USPTO is and how it is not doing anywhere close to what it was founded for.
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What is to loose if you know you are going to loose everything
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...
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Re: ...
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...
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Re: ...
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html#duration
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Re: ...
...also, thanks to Disney, copyright is protected for far, far longer than 20 years now. Basically, anything copyrighted now will still be protected by copyright when you die. It's not right, and not good, but that's the way congress is bought and paid to write the law.
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Turn over the app to Hasbro and they won't sue you.
No way Hasbro pays them. Best case scenario is they MIGHT get job offers.
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Re:
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And If Hasbro lets is slide, they can lose the ability to protect themselves.
The law suite may end up as a win-win setlement. But is also possible the Scrabulous guys were not smart enough to be polite when first contacted. We don't know much, but we do know there is clear violation of copyright. Of course maybe the makers of Scrabulous are as ignorant of the law as many who post here.
Patents are 20 years. Copyrights are much more complex and extend years after the death of the creator in the case of a person owning a copyright.
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True
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Re:
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link?
Anyways, I haven't found the lawsuit itself, so if anyone has the link, it would be much appreciated.
P.S. I tried Hasbro's online version. I was truly disappointed that they made it a "see how many words you can make" with these 7 letters game rather than laying it out like the real game board. It isn't remotely the same game.
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The original idea was doing it in a way that people actually used it. I'm amazed that people don't recognize the value of actually building a community around an application.
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Its very disappointing.
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Re: Its very disappointing.
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Uncalled for
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Re: Uncalled for
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Hasbro's colorable claim has several components. First the name itself is trademarked by Hasbro, and Scrabulous is close enough that consumers will be possibily confused as to whether Hasbro is behind the game.
Second, Hasbro probably has trade dress/trademark protection in the distinctive appearance of the game, which could also lead to consumer confusion.
Hasbro probably has a colorable cybersquatting claim - which prohibits use of a domain name with a bad faith intent to profit from an existing trademark.
Finally, Hasbro probably has some copyright protection in there as well - maybe to the layout of the board and the pieces.
The only possible tweak is that these guys are located off-shore and if they are completely off-shore they could make it more difficult for Hasbro to reach them. Since they are dealing with people in the US this is a bit tougher, ultimately Hasbro could find out who is behind the site even if they took efforts to conceal. The fact that they are off-shore would also potentially affect the TM/copyright analysis, US laws, particularly copyright law only applies to infringements that take place in the US.
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Re:
If they changed their name to "Rubble", changed the layout, gave everybody eight tiles instead of seven, and changed some of the tile values to match current statistical frequencies, would Hasbro still have a good case?
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Re: Re:
Did you ever play Wordox? That was somewhat similar to Scrabulous, but the timing and scoring was slightly different. That died when HOYLE (I believe) took it off won.net and replaced it with gambling games. I hope the brothers don't take the game off the site.
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Hasbro's Interests
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Scrabbler
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Scrabble
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Compromise!!
The brothers can always change the game to an 8 letter game and give letters some different values. That way they could make it their own.
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Niggle
You can read about it here:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~msteveb/niggle/
Hasbro/Handmark did buy it out and re-brand it as Scrabble, but made it so easy that it was no fun to play at all. The computer would sometimes score 2 points on Hard, when there were 50 point words available.
So, for those of you who are saying that Hasbro would never do such a thing, they might. They've done it before.
They would be wise to pay these guys off and embrace the popularity, which Scrabble hasn't had in years.
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This is crazy
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they should form a partnership with the scrabulous guys or buy them out.
scrabulous has brought a huge amount of interest in scrabble!
my husband and i bought travel scrabble and a regular scrabble board since our interest has been piqued this last year by scrabulous.
hasbro needs to join the internet age. get on board or watch the hundreds of thousands of scrabulous players stop buying your products. everyone is talking about a boycott in the scrabulous rooms......
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Scrabble...
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Hasbro has magical "web bug" gifs
"Clear GIFs, sometimes called "Web bugs," are file objects, usually a graphic image such as a transparent one pixel-by-one pixel GIF (Graphics Interchange Format, one of the two most common file formats for images on the Web), that are placed on a Web page or in an e-mail message to monitor user behavior. The GIF tells us the IP address of the computer that fetched our page, the URL of the page the GIF is on, the time the page was viewed, the type of browser used, and can tell us a previously set cookie value."
Wow, a 1px by 1px transparent gif can do all that? I've been in web development for 12 years, and I've never managed to get mine to do that (not that I've used transparent gifs since about, ohhh, 1995).
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Re: Hasbro has magical "web bug" gifs
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Re: Re: Hasbro has magical "web bug" gifs
And in that same 12 years I referred to before, I've never heard of this technique being called "web bugs".
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Re: Hasbro has magical "web bug" gifs
When a request is made for a web page containing the invisible 1x1 gif, the request is logged in the web server's logfile.
By extracting info from the log, (IP address) you can get information on usage, certain behaviors, ect.
12 years huh? I'm surprised you've never heard of this trick....
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Re: Hasbro has magical "web bug" gifs (OFF TOPIC)
The point of being 1x1 pixel and transparent is that you won't see these GIFs at all, nor do they take any time to load. Lots of people use this kind of trick to track users across a variety of web pages.
The cookie thing works like this: When you visit Hasbro's website, they give your browser a cookie, which might identify your session or even user ID if you log on to their website in some way. If your browser is well-behaved, it won't pass that cookie to some other random server, only to the one which gave it to you. However, if there's an image linked back to Hasbro's website from, say, Amazon.com or somewhere, Hasbro will get your IP address, any cookies they've given you, etc etc, when you look at the page on Amazon.com. Or whatever. It's only sinister if you use this kind of approach creatively. Embedded off-site javascript, java and flash animations are all FAR more interesting and potentially damaging.
If you want to keep marketeers from profiling your web surfing habits, turn off java, javascript, auto-loading of images from other sites, disable flash and shockwave, NEVER use Internet Explorer (or the AOL browser), get (say) Firefox and plugins like NoScript. If you surf to the less reputable corners of the web sometimes, *definitely* disable flash and java/javascript, there are some evil exploits around. If you're REALLY paranoid, use anonymising proxies and tunnel your connections...
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Scrabulous
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no comment
Now would it have motivated me to buy a copy of the Physical board game? hmm maybe but maybe not ....
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Hasbro
Sid Snake
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It's explainable why it took Hasbro so long
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Hasbro
a Scrabble site. But they sure don't want anyone else to enjoy playing the game. I think Scrabulous is a great site and I play on thepixiepit, too and word biz. All good sites.
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Boycott Hasbro Group
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Trademarks
That's a lot to lose.
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Hasbro are a holes
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Join the Don't let them ban Scrabulous group on Fa
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brain push-ups
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matel pricks
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Hasbro vs Scrabulous
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scrabulous
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Hmmm
Second, although Hasbro is clearly correct that Scrabulous is infringing on its trademarks, Scrabulous exists because official efforts by Hasbro to create online offerings of Scrabble have been a disaster. As someone else mentioned, there was a CD-ROM that let you play Scrabble via e-mail or by directly connect with someone else over the Internet (i.e., you had to know the other person's IP address).
So, Hasbro is ending up in the same situation as the music industry, suing folks who are providing what consumers actually want. The smart thing to do would be to buy it.
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please, please don't take it away
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Capitalism- what do you expect
If we send the message to inventors that their ideas will be stolen and capitalized upon by others without any royalities, would they want to invent?
I know better then to go out in the world and write the next installment of the Harry Potter series on my own. Or make a homage to Tetris and call it Tetriss ...
We are going to have many more challenges like this with our new global market, a market that intrinsically doesn't understand patents and copyrights.
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Scrabulous
Thanks you to Rajat & Jayant for having the initiative to do develop Scrabulous and for providing many hours of entertainment!
All work and no play makes Hasbro a dull company!
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Scrabulous
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scrabulous
However, with "scrabulous", we play online all the time!
It bridges the distance and provides loads of social interaction. I totally agree that Hasbro should work out an agreement to make this a win-win situation for all!
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really now
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Will never buy or recommend scrabble
So either come up with a online version we can play or forget support all together, Scrabble money hungry idiots.
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scrabulous
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Long history
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scrabulous
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Write to Hasbro
http://www.hasbro.com/default.cfm?page=cs_contact
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ISC Scrabble
He runs a 2 tier system. One for PAYING players and the other for non payers. Apparantly paying players have certain advantages and although it is vehermently denied, a number of players including myself are sure that ISC control tile distribution.They do not answer serious enquiries to non paying members and threy do not adhere to some off their rules.
There heplers are inept and very ineficient. They do not give serious answers and are on most occasions , no help at all. In my opninion, despite a huge following world wide you should monitor this site and see what you think. I think thy are a bunch of amatures
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