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."

Comments

I love Scrabulous, but....

[sampson7]

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.

Re:I love Scrabulous, but....

[jesdynf]

It's not as cut and dried as you say. You can't copyright the rules of a game, only your specific explanation of them.

There's probably infringing content, and I suppose they are trading on Hasbro's mark, but no, Hasbro doesn't own the platonic ideal of That Specific Word-Tile Game. What Hasbro owns is their description and presentation of that game, and various marks associated with it.

At least, as I understand things.

This is what I am worried about..

[peltedsoftware]

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.

Still alternatives

[uberphear]

Unfortunately, Hasbro will most likely come out on top because the Scrabble board layout itself is copyrighted and trademarked.

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.

Counter Sue

[AmericanInKiev]

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

Re:Yes, it's too old.

[cpt kangarooski]

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.