Slashdot Mirror
e-Scrabble gets Cease and Desist Order from Hasbro
Matthew Dull writes "Home-brewed e-Scrabble.com recently received a cease-and-desist order from Hasbro Inc., owners of the famous board game Scrabble. E-scrabble, home to over 100,000 active players, has been hosting up online versions of the game to happily addicted players for over a year now (maybe more), and only now does Hasbro come forth with a lawsuit. The creator of the site, known only as Jared, has posted the letter he received from Hasbro's lawyers. However common it may be, it always seems a tragedy when a big corporation stomps its heavy foot on a fledgling but very successful piece of web software that is close to many people's heart." (It's also the best online Scrabble game I've seen; Hasbro should pay Jared, not sue him.)
There's a great way to enforce a cease-and-desist order. Slashdot the site.
When I started up www.e-slashdot.org, over 100,00 people came and read my geek news. Then some lawyers from some Open Source Lab place got all pissy and sent me a letter. Once more a large corporation slams the little guy!
I was posting good news from independent sources. Heck, they should have paid me!
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
When I told a friend a while back that Hasbro owns both Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, he asked, perfectly sincerely, "Isn't that some sort of monopoly?" And then instantly recognized the accidental pun.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
That site may have the best Scrabble game in the world on it. My problem is that the last time I downloaded a "client program" from Romania, I ended up paying a lot of money in long distance phone bills that I couldn't explain.
:-P
Someone else willing to vouch for this guy?
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
He could have called it iScrabble and had Apple on their ass too.
If he really wanted to stick it to them, he could just change the name of his game to "Hasbro the Scrabble Bully". Now with triple-lawsuit score.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's Hasbro's game, and Hasbro's money, and I bet many of those 100,000 players thought (as in were deliberately tricked into believing) they were playing official Scrabble.
Fuck Jared and his Subway subs. He'll always be fat on the inside.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Let's play a game of word substitution for a minute. Let's pretend that "Hasbro" = "F/OSS developer", "Scrabble" = "GPLed code" and that "e-Scrabble" = "commercial/CSS developer". Now, imagine a commercial/CSS developer took someone else's GPLed code and ignored all relevant copyrights, trademarks and legal protections. Now whose side are you on?
I'm surprised that no one is claiming that Hasbro is attacking free speech or that Jared should be protected by journalist shield laws. Or that because Jared and those that visit his site obviously like scrabble, Hasbro is attacking its own fan base.
On the other hand, I think Jared's strongest defense would be to claim his site is a parody of Scrabble, and thus protected by fair use. To overcome the plaintiff's claim that they don't get the joke, the defense, at closing arguments, could merely pass their hand above their head, and say, "Whoosh!." That would be almost as good as the Chewbacca defense.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I don't think it's really fair to say that they have a right to sue people over a basic word game. In fact, I doubt even they came up with the idea in the first place -- there's probably some ancient depiction of Greek commonpeople playing a local variant of similar game somewhere.
/., and your non-support of heiroglyphic charactersets!
"I have [snake][square][dagger][cat][squiggly][triangle] on a triple-word score!"
"Hey, that's not a word!"
"Is so! The -[squiggly][triangle] is an accepted alternate spelling. Check the Book of Ra-sha-ha if you don't believe me!"
Tomorrow, the New York Times will sue online crossword-puzzle sites.
P.S. darn you,
So who's got a torrent of the game?
Anyone who copies a product like Scrabble but expects not to be sued is naive beyond imagination. Get a clue.
No, no, no. Hasbro owns Clue as well.