With Scrabulous Gone…
…Facebook is dumb again.
The correct move for Hasbro and Mattel, if they want both control and goodwill, would be to buy out Scrabulous. With their lawsuit, they may gain control, but they will not gain my goodwill. In other news, these forever-long copyrights are out of control.
I hereby state that I will never play the officially sanctioned online game.
July 30th, 2008 at 02:09:17 am
From what I understand, it was actually a trademark issue. As far as I know, game mechanics can’t be patented or copyrighted. If this is indeed true, I have a bit more sympathy for Hasbro – under law, they pretty much have to sue Scrabulous in order to keep their trademark intact – although buying instead of suing would probably have been much better.
Also, what’s up with http://scrabulous.com?
July 30th, 2008 at 05:38:04 pm
But, if you buy “Scrabulous”, then pretty soon you have to buy “Scrabbleton”, and “Scrabbalicious” and . . .
It would be a nice way to make a living — thinking up names likely to judged as infringing or causing confusion with respect to a well known brand name and then selling out to the copyright or service mark owner.
Back in the early days of Applied Microsystems, we first named our emulator for the Zilog Z80 processor the “EZ80”. They wrote us a letter and said we could not do that . . . so we folded and called it the “EM-184”.
So, I think they have to sue. (Presumably they have tried a polite letter, first.)
Jim
July 30th, 2008 at 07:30:28 pm
@Jim: There is little question that Hasbro et al. will win the suit, as Scrabulous very clearly infringes. But Scrabulous also has hundreds of thousands of daily users, which Hasbro is alienating from the game by taking down the Facebook version.
Two guys in India beat a huge 5.5 billion-dollar company to market and got a ton more people interested in playing scrabble (like me, who never cared for the game before). Hasbro should be thankful, but they aren’t acting that way. Certainly, Hasbro has the right to sue Scrabulous, but I also have the right to shun Hasbro for that decision.
August 7th, 2008 at 09:26:49 pm
Wordscraper, Scrabulous’ replacement made by the same developers, is still not quite as polished as Scrabulous was, but it is close. I will be (and am already) using it.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:43:05 am
I loved Scrabulous…I played regularly and when it was announce that Hasbro had forced them to shut down…I was more than willing to give Hasbro a chance. I loaded the application and tried to play and all I can say is that “THAT VERSION SUCKSâ€. It is unreliable. You can’t always load a game or it freezes in the middle of game. The ability to see others on the network is inconsistant. The first time I tried to play, it felt like I was the character in I Am Legend…the only one out there. Scabulous needs to come back…until then nothing else will be acceptable. So much for the giant corporations.