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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."
Is there any serious doubt that Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro's intellectual property? The "creators" of Scrabulous don't even make a token effort to add some new intellectual component to their game. So yeah, while I love Scrabulous, and will probably re-join the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group, I don't think that they really have a leg to stand on.
I wrote a couple of iPhone games that are clones of Yahtzee, and Battleship respectivly. One thing that worried me is getting sued like this. All I can do is hope to not rock their boat to much. I tried not to infringe on any trademarks, but who knows with these big ass companies.
Is probably to ignore damages (or settle out of court in a way that the brothers aren't pissed off). They ought to then have Scrabulous disabled and then work with the brothers and EA to migrate Scrabulous users over to the official Scrabble app.
Free publicity+userbase >> damages
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
The lawsuit wouldn't be quite so egregious if Hasbro offered their own online Scrabble game which wasn't extortionately priced, offered the same level of interactivity and community, and didn't suck all manner of ass.
Will they unsheathe the "lost sales" gun too, I wonder? If anything, Scrabulous made me more interested in Scrabble than any number of adverts or publicity by Hasbro ever has. Let's all go play on the Internet Scrabble Club instead.
Here's an interesting argument.
If the court concludes that the differences between a cardboard-n-wood game, and an electronic - internet power game having similar look and feel IS a diminuative difference - then this decision could be cited in every X-on-the-Internet patent as equally dissmissing the key feature of "Novelty".
In this country, the USPTO has granted endless claims for invention which are simply some traditional application - but rewired to work on the Internet. Mail (by Internet), Mail (by wireless ala Blackberry) Voice (over IP), shopping carts(on the internet), From buttons to telecommunications, shopping to sex, every aspect of our society has been "virtualized" and in every case won the argument that the virtualized version was novel and distinct from the real world counter-part.
Patents are only good for 15 years or so. so the workings of Scrabble are public domain (ie the addition and multiplication of points, placements etc... Only the name and logo are protect-able at this point. The broad net that would capture Scrabulous and scrabble would ensnare Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, ABC and NBC.
If I were Scrabulous, I would counter sue for infringement on the new EA Scrabble version, on the grounds that the similarities between EA Scrabble and Scrabulous are greater than the similarities between Scrabble-the-Board-Game, and Scrabulous. In short, the addition of internet connectivity and facebook integration is a novel game which serves a customer base which is completely unavailble to a Boardgame due to distance - while the duplicate EA version serves exactly the same customer in exactly the same way.
AIK
So, I've been playing with FreeCiv and FreeCol, and I thought their commentary was interesting.
The question was posed: isn't this blatant copyright infringement?
And their answer was - maybe not. Although it's clear that you can copyright graphics and sounds, and you can copyright a story and a plot, and you can copyright code, and you can copyright maps - it isn't clear whether you can copyright a ruleset.
It isn't clear, for example, whether you can copyright the concept of turning a card sideways to increase a number used to play other cards. It isn't clear whether the concept of a 2-D character jumping from one platform to another, and losing a life if he doesn't make it, could have been copyrighted.
Maybe this will clear some things up. Scrabble, after all, has no real proprietary art beyond their logo maybe the font used on the tiles. It's just rules, and nothing more. Can you copyright a concept? (Actually, that sounds more like something you'd use a patent for).
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
When the RIAA sued Napster, I decided they'd never see another dime from me - and, true to my word, I haven't bought another RIAA-member album since. Haven't pirated many, either. Turns out independent music is actually pretty good.
Well, guess what. Now I'm done with Hasbro. I'm uninstalling M:TGO; I won't be replacing Cranium, Axis & Allies, Risk, or Monopoly when they inevitably wear out; I won't be buying any video game based on Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, etc.
Fuck companies that cling to the antiquated business model that withholding entertainment through legal action is still a valid way to do things.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
They own Parker Brothers and Wizards of the Coast, among a dozen other brand names, so yes, they are still producing games. D&D 4th edition just came out after all, and they still keep churning out new versions of the old classics.
If you haven't heard of NEW board games, then you probably aren't a parent. Who else even buys new board games now? The classics still sell extremely well, and there's not much interest in anything new except for the occasional fluke that becomes a fad, or this or that game based on whatever cartoon is popular now for kids.
I'm not writing this to defend their good name, and it does seem wrong to me that they own the rights to just about every game and toy in Western culture, but you make it sound like they're just a holding corporation making money from frivolous lawsuits.
Wow, I don't think that would actually stand up if challenged. I mean it could cover some Poker games.
Hell, I created a game call flaming Aces that involved each person bringing there own deck of cards to the table in 1978.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But trademarks do suffer from genericide. I think that this has happened in the case of SCRABBLE. Remember, the sine qua non of trademarks is that they denote that all so-marked goods or services share a common origin; they do not, however, denote the name or type of product which is marked. Hasbro knows this: if you look closely at what they do, you see that what they sell is the SCRABBLE-brand crossword game. That is, according to them, the name of the game is 'crossword game,' just as the product marked as LEVI'S are jeans, not "levi's."
But even when the mark holder does everything right, the public can still wind up associating the trademark with the good itself. When a trademark can't denote the origin of goods, but merely describes the goods themselves, it has gone generic. TRAMPOLINE, ESCALATOR, and ELEVATOR are all good examples of this. THERMOS, KLEENEX, and XEROX are all perpetually on the knife's edge. SANKA was teetering for a while, but eventually people stopped calling all decaffeinated coffee "sanka," which revitalized the mark.
I bet that if you conducted a survey of board game players, you'd find that they overwhelmingly think that the game in question is called "scrabble," not "crossword game." If that's so, then the trademark is generic, and everyone is allowed to call their version of that game by that name. And in fact, a carefully-designed and implemented survey is precisely the sort of evidence that you would go into court with.
So merely showing that people think that the game on Scrabulous' web site is called SCRABBLE isn't enough to sink them. If those people think that the game is called SCRABBLE, whoever sells or provides it, then that's what will sink Hasbro instead.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I wrote a Connect4 game for the iPhone called Touch4 (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=283490535). I did some research on this and the name can be trademarked which is what MAY be the issue here. Like scrabble, the game play for connect four is centuries old and there cannot be infringement on that. My guess is that this is a negotiation tactic my Hasbro. I am watching this one closely. I wanted to name our pong game with Pong in the name but decided not to take the legal risk which is why it's called Touch Tennis (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284442084). I think the other games with Pong in the name are at legal risk. Some of them aren't even pong, but just using "Pong" to get hits.
Not necessarily.
I'm not sure whether the rules explicitly mention a star; if they do, it serves only as a reference to the center square. You could play scrabble on a board with a different symbol, or no symbol at all. Its inclusion just makes it easier to determine where you can play the first word.
You could play a (boring) game of Scrabble on a board with no special squares -- the rules are the same, they just don't all apply to the board you're using. Literati on Yahoo Games uses a board with special squares in different spots. /pedantic