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Hasbro Sues Makers of Scrabble-Like Scrabulous
Dekortage writes "As today's lawsuit indicates, Hasbro has apparently had enough of Scrabulous, the online word game remarkably similar to Scrabble. Filed in New York, Hasbro's suit is against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, brothers from Kolkata, India, and asks the court to remove the Scrabulous application from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com web site, and grant damages and attorneys fees to Hasbro. Why did Hasbro tale so long to 'protect' its intellectual property rights in court? They waited 'in deference to the fans' until EA had launched the official Scrabble Facebook app earlier this month. EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million. This was the next logical step for Hasbro after filing DMCA takedown notices against Scrabulous in January."
How about Hasbro makes an application that isn't only available in America and Canada before they spoil our fun?
Yes. There is a serious doubt, at least on one of their claims.
They are raising two basic claims, under trademark law and copyright law. The trademark claim is basically that consumers will be confused into thinking this had something to do with Hasbro. The similarity of the names -- "Scrabble" v. "Scrabulous" doesn't help much. But, changing the name solves that problem.
The harder case for Hasbro is the copyright claim -- games have "thin" copyrights. In general, the only elements that are protected are (a) the text of the instructions and (b) the graphical elements. So, if Scrabulous didn't copy the Scrabble instructions and didn't copy the graphical elements, they should be fine.
Even on the graphical elements, if there are a small number of ways of expressing something, that expression is not protected either. So, for example, you need some way of putting both the point value and letter on each tile. With a small number of ways of doing so, I suspect that the tiles themselves are not protected. It's possible that Scrabulous might be dinged for copying Hasbro's choice of colors for the squares.
I have not played Scrabulous, so I just have no idea how this plays out.
Great blog post at http://www.thelegality.com/archives/11
Actually, Hasbro withdrew their prior lawsuit against Scrabulous *until* such time as it could put its own service up on Facebook. Hasbro's version is now live, and they have recommenced their suit. Ergo, this is new news.
Way to pick the ONE article in the history of /. that is actually *not* a dupe.
Trademarks do not expire, nor is there a strong argument that they should, other than after a company stops selling the product.
The test in trademark law is "likelihood of confusion." Which is to say, if you went up to a man in the street, and said, "We have a game where you spell words using tiles on a crossword like board, and get points for the letters, and it's called Scrabulous" is there a reasonable chance a person might confuse that with Scrabble, the trademarked Hasbro game?
I have to say it sure sounds like yes. And if it's a yes (and depending on how good your lawyers are it doesn't have to be a very strong yes) then the case is pretty clear.
Trademarks don't expire because aside from protecting the company, they are viewed as also protecting the public from being tricked into buying counterfeit goods. Of course, sometimes the public is better off with counterfeit goods, but the law does not take that view.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Scrabble is a noun and a verb as well as a proper noun, and so is allowed. Since it is eight letters long, you are most likely to use up all of your letters spelling it and so you get 50 extra points. Scrabulous is a proper noun and not a real word, so it is not allowed.
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You can't copyright a game, but you *can* copyright a game board. Scrabulous used the Scabble game board (and that was a big part of why it was successful with existing Scrabble players), so they're probably doomed - it's a genuine old-school copyright violation, no DMCA required.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You can't copyright a game, but you *can* copyright a game board.
You also apparently can patent game mechanics.
According to Hasbro, the very name "Scrabulous" infringes the Hasbro trademark, since (they say) it's confusingly similar.
That one might be debatable, but they also claim that scrabulous.com used to have META tags saying things like "free online scrabble". If that's true, then I'd think the case is pretty open-and-shut. I tried to check at archive.org, but it seems the Scrabulous people blocked archive.org from their site. (Hmm, that doesn't exactly reek of good faith, does it?)
Yeah, I doubt Hasbro will get any money out of them. However, Facebook isn't based in India, so the Facebook app will certainly be taken down if Hasbro wins this case, and that's the main thing they appear to want.
You can copyright a game. I remember a few years ago, Hasbro sued Kellogg for having a card matching game on their cereal boxes as part of a Finding Nemo promotion, saying it too closely resembled their Memory card game. Wizards of the Coast even has a patent for "games, published in the form of trading cards...
No, you can't copyright a game. The Kelloggs thing was a trademark claim which was settled out of court so who knows how that would have went. Your other example is a patent issue. I guess it needs to be repeated, once more, that patents, trademarks and copyright are all different things. Kelloggs link
You can copyright any drawing, painting or other artwork, photograph, etc. Copyright is not limited to text.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.