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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."

6 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: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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  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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.