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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead
eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.
If the people behind Scrabulous have any pride, they'll tell Hasbro to go fuck themselves. They did a better Scrabble than Scrabble, and rather than compete, Hasbro turned to the law.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Just another sad day when an entity demands and is granted the right to continue to profit exclusivly on an idea that is decades old.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Not that I back Hasbro, but purchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
They probably didn't want to reward the people who ripped off their game.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
uhhh, yeah that isn't exactly a new business strategy.
We really REALLY need copyright reform. I'm 56 years old. Nothing ever created in my lifetime will reach the public domain while I still breathe, and no matter how young you are nothing created in your lifetime will reach the public domain either. And as this Scabble thing shows, it stifles creativity. When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that), the same could be said of art.
Where would engineering be if patents were endless, like copyrights are? Endless copyrights stifle creativity. Where would Disney be without the Brothers Grimm? And how can we convince our governments that they are hindering artistic progress?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why not? Isn't that how most small-time inventors get noticed by big companies...either developing a new product or improving an existing one?
A couple of college student can't approach Hasbro and say "We've got a great idea for an online version of Scrabble...will you let us make it?" Hasbro will laugh them out the doors. But when they execute it well and have a massive fan base, why would Hasbro NOT want to cash in on what is already there and developed?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
There are still plenty of us who care about myspace / facebook. Most people on the Internet are on one (or both) of those. I see why this article justifies front-page status.
Or how about I bitch about all the articles about C and Ruby and a whole load of other programming languages I don't know? Or websites that I personally don't care about? Should the front-page only have articles that we all care about? I'm guessing that would be quite a short list.
It means he thinks that there aren't millions of non-US facebook users because he hasn't bothered to look.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I don't see a single article on the front page that affects everyone.
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace. Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
There's a lot of prior art.
If it was simply a matter of Trademark then Scrabulous and Niggle would have no more problem than MAD Magazine.
Not that I back Hasbro, but purchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
Also known as "Do our R & D for us for free, and we'll give you money if you come up with something really good." That's I message I wouldn't just send, I'd broadcast it at top volume.
Legallly, this claim has nothing to do with trademark. Please, stop spreading FUD.
This game was pulled under the DMCA. The DMCA only protects against copyright infringement, it has NO PROVISIONS AT ALL for trademark infringement.
If this game had (in Scrabble's opinion) simply violated trademark, they could NOT have leveraged the DMCA.
Now, if Scrabble has, in fact, perjured itself (DMCAing without cause *is* perjury), scrabulous must file a DMCA counter-claim. They will win, and should win big, if, in fact, Scrabble has perjured itself.
I expect Scrabble actually has committed perjury, because I highly doubt any code or instructions (the copyrighted parts of Scrabble, the board/name are TRADEMARKS, totally different) in Scrabulous are non-original.
Go Rajat and Jaynat, go!
So instead they chose to punish people who played their game. That's brilliant!
[P]urchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
Well, consider that the US Constitution says that patent and copyright laws are to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and doing a better job than Hasbro would certainly satisfy the "promote the Progress" part, I'd think that's what the Constitution's authors intended.
Of course, you could question the "useful" part when the issue is a game like Scrabble. But that would be petty, wouldn't it?
Still, I'd think that if someone copies a commercial product and improves on it, the laws should support the people who did the improving. Maybe impose some sort of "mechanical license" between the two parties, as is done with with some performances of music, giving both parties a standard portion of the profits.
We've had a problem from the very beginning of patent and copyright, that the owner can (and usually does) use the law to block further progress. If we really want that Progress that the Constitution promised us, we need laws that prevent things like what Hasbro has just done, and what many others have done before them.
Of course, in this case it's primarily a trademark issue. So it'll be interesting to see how Hasbro reacts to a re-release of Scrabulous under another name that doesn't sound like a derivative of Scrabble.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"But when they execute it well and have a massive fan base, why would Hasbro NOT want to cash in on what is already there and developed?"
Hubris.
I would like to see Slashdot return to actually discussing important technical news
Then find some and submit it.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Yes, well that's because the Trademark still has value. Why should the Scrabulous guys leech off the marketing millions that Hasbro pumped in over the years. If Scrabulous was good enough on its own terms to succeed without trademark leeching, they should have just called it something else: they would have succeeded irrespective.
Copyright does not require innovation, just originality.
Centuries ago games like Chess and Snakes & Ladders were invented/ discovered in india. but the west came along and simply said "look, we're going to copy these games"
Most of Hasbro's board is so old they probably have to have oxygen tents built into the boardroom.
That made me laugh out loud.
And it's so true. Hasbro is living in the 1980s, still trying to make money off GIJoe and My Little Pony.
They don't have enough tiles to make the word "innovate."
Making drugs for people who can't afford to pay is much better than patenting rice and traditional medicine!
My daughter is in college and is an avid Facebook user.
She also has been playing Scrabble, or is it Scrabulous, for months now. She typically has 2 or 3 games going at once with different friends. If she has an idle minute or two, she'll get online and check how her games are going, whether it's her turn yet, etc.
Most of her Scrabble/Scrabulous activity is of the instant sort, the got-a-free-minute type. If the game doesn't come up in seconds, if it takes minutes to start, what's the point. She didn't have that much time right then, anyway.
Sometimes speed really is of the essence, even in a non-FPS.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We have quite a few board games in our house. We also have video games. They are both fun in their own respects. The nice thing about board games is so little development costs. They created over 60 years ago, and are still selling it for $15 for the basic, and $45 for the deluxe version (prices from Amazon). It is risky starting out, but once you have something popular it's easy to put out the same product year after year and rake in the money.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Scrabulous as a name is dangerously close to the trademarked name Scrabble. Yahoo has Literati which is Scrabble with a different name, and Hasbro leaves them alone. There are a hundred other scrabble clones as well, all with the sense to not use the trademarked name.
Hasbro seems to be rejecting the idea that anyone would want to just play the damn game. Clearly people would rather see 3d tiles float around than be able to place them quickly and easily in order to enjoy the game itself.
Bottles.
Try TRUANT?
It would only be of limited PR value to pay the developers to keep their code and it would encourage other people to make programs based off of Hasbro's games.
It's not about PR. It's about buying large, established user-bases.
Why would they put all the time and effort into building facebook versions of their games without knowing which ones will take off, when developers can do it for them?
They can just sit back and pick off the most successful ones for guaranteed profit.
It is.
Xerox? Generic name for any photocopier. Kleenex? Generic name for any paper handkerchief. Aspirin? Generic name for any painkiller with acetylsalicylic acid as its active ingredient.
Scrabble? Um, highly specific name for a single board game made exclusively by two companies. The average person wouldn't refer to any other board game as "a scrabble", even if it involved making words with tiles.
Except...Hasbro had nothing to do with the development of Scrabble. Neither did Selchow & Richter, who owned the assets before they were bought by Hasbro.
That's irrelevant. I didn't build my house. Neither did the family I bought it from. Nor did the people they bought it from. But we transferred the rightful ownership of such through various transactions.
Same with Scrabble. Capitalism would fall apart if all of a sudden we could say "ahhhh, you weren't the original owner/creator/inventor/builder of that, give up your ownership now!" Why would anyone bother to acquire rights of a property such as Scrabble, knowing they were worthless. They wouldn't. Those rights were bought for what both parties agreed was a fair price at the time, and there's no reason to invalidate that ongoing ownership today. Each of the companies involved speculated on the value of scrabble, up until Hasbro today, and is rightfully benefiting from it.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Scrabulous is not dead.
It is merely shut down on Facebook.
It still works perfectly well on Scrabulous.com, so everyone can just stop freaking out, and go play the game on their own website.
Also, while I personally think Hasbro is completely within their rights here (nobody stopped the Scrabulous guys from rearranging the bonus tile layout, and calling it "the amazing Indian word-making tile game"), they'd have a hard time stopping scrabulous.co.in or just for kicks, scrabulous.ru
I talked with my daughter after she got home from work, today. She lost 2 in-progress games, one with her boyfriend and one with a friend from high school. She's more upset about losing her game statistics, though. Her boyfriend was over for dinner tonight, and he's tried the official Scrabble. It didn't get very far before it crashed. She's downstairs playing dead-tree Scrabble with my wife, now.
Don't know what will fill the niche Scrabulous used to occupy.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.