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Facebook Scrabble Rip-off Capitalizes on Mattel's Lethargy

Posted by Zonk on from the missed-a-bit-of-an-opportunity-there dept.

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."

11 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Scrabble cannot be copyrighted. by Reverend528 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Copyright applies to an expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Scrabble is not an expression.

    The image of the board can be copyrighted. The manual can be copyrighted. The logo can be trademarked. But the rules of the game are not subject to copyright.

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    1. Re:Scrabble cannot be copyrighted. by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 5, Informative

      The image of the board can be copyrighted. The manual can be copyrighted. The logo can be trademarked. But the rules of the game are not subject to copyright.

      Yeah, people are clueless about intellectual property. I dug up the original Reuters article this is referencing, assuming somewhere along the line someone copying it had managed to confuse copyright and trademarks. Sadly, it appears it was the original reporter that screwed up. He says they threatened with regard to copyrights, but all the direct quotes refer to trademarks, brands and "intellectual property." Never once does any spokesperson for Mattel reference copyright directly.

      Note, trademarks are probably what are at issue since "Scrabulous" is easily confused with "Scrabble." The authors of the game should have picked something that did not reference the trademarked name.

    2. Re:Scrabble cannot be copyrighted. by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 3, Informative

      The arrangement of bonus squares could be subject to copyright.

      I don't think this is true. You could patent the arrangement, but that would have expired by now. You could patent certain images in certain locations, but if, for example, a clone used a different symbol or text to indicate bonus squares I don't think that would be considered copyright infringement.

      Also (although with somewhat less certainty) the selection of available letters could be subject to copyright.

      Again, I think this would have to be a patent.

      Change these, and you'll end up with a game that is somewhat like Scrabble, but which isn't Scrabble and which isn't subject to copyright.

      I'm pretty sure copyright is a mistake made by the Reuters reporter. He references copyright, but the Mattel representative says "trademark" and "Scrablous" is pretty confusingly similar to "Scrabble" such that the average person could certainly think the former was made by the same person as the latter.

    3. Re:Scrabble cannot be copyrighted. by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 3, Informative

      What bothers me about these discussions on Slashdot is that 99% of the time, it's people that aren't lawyers, and don't really have a sense of what the law actually is.

      Actually I had already linked to this page which is the U.S. office of copyright's page for guidelines on copyrighting games. It specifically excludes the items I mentioned and since trademark does not apply to such items, patent is all that is left.

      "I feel that the law is this way" really isn't a valid argument.

      You're correct, excepting the fact that your statement is a straw man, since neither I nor the other poster claimed we felt anything, only what we thought.

      Can either the parent or the GP point to some precedent - legislation, caselaw or anything to support their positions

      Strangely I don't have a legal library handy. I did, however, cite public documents published by the government.

      What jurisdiction would this be filed in?

      Likely India for ease of getting damages.

      Is there any jurisdiction that would support Mattel or Hasbro's position?

      And what position, exactly, is that? Mattel, who has standing in this, has only talked about trademarks. Lots of jurisdictions will support their rights in that regard and they probably have a pretty slam-dunk case with Scrabble and Scrabulous being so similar.

      These are all important questions before you can start to argue abstractly on law you don't know about.

      You don't have to be an expert on intellectual property laws to have a reasonable handle on them, given that they are fairly uniform in most of the world. That applies double in a simple case like this.

  2. Flagrant violation of copyright law by RedWizzard · · Score: 3, Informative

    How exactly is Scrabulous in "flagrant violation of copyright law"? Did they copy the text of the rules wholesale? Did they use the Scrabble trademark? Scrabulous may be a blatant rip-off of Scrabble, but it's not at all clear that it violates any of Mattel's intellectual property.

  3. Copyright by N7DR · · Score: 3, Informative

    Games are usually patented. Weirdly, though, Scrabble seems to have been copyrighted instead (http://www.mattelscrabble.com/en/adults/history/page6.html). It's pretty difficult for a non-lawyer like me to see how this is adequate protection. (If it was patented at some point, the patent must surely have expired anyway.)

  4. Re:Unfortunately... by Reverend528 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Patents last 17 years. Scrabble is 70 years old. That would place its rules in the public domain.

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  5. Mattel has always been protective of scrabble by Evets · · Score: 4, Informative

    The fact that this is news to the guys who built Scrabulous just shows that they haven't done their homework. Mattel has been very aggressive about shutting down online scrabble implementations since the early days of the web.

  6. Re:Uh, Flagrant Violation of What? by PitaBred · · Score: 3, Informative

    Do you know WHY Microsoft settled? It was looking dangerously close that they would lose Windows as a trademark entirely because of how generic it is, so they settled to make sure it didn't go to court. At least that's what I've heard speculated most reliably... I don't think the actual details were released.

    Which means that if you're trying to draw parallels here, Mattel is in for a world of hurt.

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  7. The law seems pretty clear to this non-lawyer... by Max+Threshold · · Score: 4, Informative

    "The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.

    "Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles."     - http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

  8. I've been playing Scrabble online for years at ISC by femto113 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's the "International Scrabble Club" at http://www.isc.ro/ Servers are run out of Romania to avoid the legal issues. It manages to attract many of the best Scrabble players in the world.