Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Scrabble Rip-off Capitalizes on Mattel's Lethargy
mlimber writes "The Facebook app Scrabulous was written by two Scrabble-loving brothers in India, has over 700,000 users, brings in about $25,000 per month in advertising revenue, and is in flagrant violation of copyright law. The corporate owners of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, have threatened legal action against the creators and have made deals with Electronic Arts and RealNetworks to release official online versions of the game. But according to an NYTimes article, 'Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated,' and according to one consultant to the entertainment industry, 'If you're Hasbro or Mattel, it isn't in your interest to shut this down.' Hasbro's partner RealNetworks is 'working closely' with the piratical brothers, but Mattel says that 'settling with the [brothers] would set a bad precedent' for other board games going online."
firstpost
Does EA need to develop a version of online Scrabble? What are they going to do, make a Directx 10 only version of it with Ageia physics so that it runs only on Vista with a hardware physics card? For a pro-flash developer I think it will take only a weekend of work to make a beta version of a clone of scrabble.
This space for rent.
From the summary:
Hasbro's partner RealNetworks is 'working closely' with the piratical brothers, but some douchebag lawyers at Mattel says that 'settling with the [brothers] would set a bad precedent' for other board games going online."
Not everybody at Mattel is a strategic idiot. But why should some douchebag lawyer let increased profits stand in the way of a good old fashioned pointless lawsuit?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
There's 26 different letters there, plus a blank. That's what's copyrighted :)
Not to mention the famous 'Batman's belt' case.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
... but no. SCRABBLE, feh. I wanna summon lions in the plains!
Sorry, Trouble is a Milton Bradley game!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I count seven:
* black (sometimes Asian) cop, white cop
* family man has crisis, family is there for him, or he discovers he doesn't need them
* quest to kill bad guy
* boy learns he has special gift, and then goes to avenge his parents/guardians
* some tragedy strikes a town (such as monster attack), and a small group of people must kill monster, etc, or maybe leave.
* hunted man must escape to freedom and kill his hunters
* some guy must solve a series of obscure puzzles to find treasure/kidnapped girlfriend or family member/save world
There's actually probably a few dozen movie plots. But I'm pretty none of them are copyrightable.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Sorry! is a Parker Brothers game.
"Hey that's not right! They were only stealing money from the creators!"
The creator of Scrabble is dead. At this point it is only "stealing" from a large corporation whose only concern is money making. Is it legal? No. But I consider it quite a bit less ethically broken than if Mr. Butts (yes, that's his name) was still alive and actively profiting from his creation.
Yeah, but your GP isn't saying he shouldn't "be able to have an opinion about what the law should be" but that "the law is this because I think it's that way" is NOT valid reasoning. That's like me saying "I think the law says if I fart on tuesday I get whatever the wind touches, so thus, I don't see the problem with copyright infringement."
The guy is just pissed that idiots come on Slashdot and say "nope, the law says you can patent arguments, but this other stuff needs to be copyrighted. Keep in mind I'm talking out of my ass" with no support, no logic, nothing to back up their "this is how the law is I think" other than some random thought that popped into their head.
Yeah, any asshat CAN post uninformed opinions on Slashdot, he's just saying maybe they shouldn't, or maybe they should try to look into a subject before just being wrong.
GGP didn't have an opinion on what the law should be, which is subjective, but he had an "opinion" on what the factual, objective state of what the law was. That's not an opinion, that's a mistaken belief.
Damned italics; I wondered what you meant by "This is I." for a second there...
Would you like a slice of toast?