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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.
The developers asked too much money? Hasbro was too stingy? Hope they realize their mistake now and offer a decent price to the brothers who developed scrablous.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Boggle clone changed its name, and its still up. There have been perfectly legal scrabble clone games published since the 1940s. I have some in my collection of antique toys and games. All you have to do is not use the trademarked name.
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My god! It must have been a heroic effort to somehow drum up interest in something that ancient! If they could do that for Scrabble, imagine what they could do for chess, or go, or even poker!
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
The Web-based version of Scrabulous seems to be working just fine.
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
I doubt the creators of Scrabulous had the foresight to patent their invention of "method to play the board game Scrabble using information technology," but if they did, they would have an awesome countersuit. Would the courts rule in favor of trademark or patent?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
For a start the game dates back to 1938! The guy who designed it died in 1993, he actually sold it in the 1940s and it was trademarked then. And they still try and extort money from it? For fucks sake.
This can only backlash against HASBRO - they will make not a penny from the new Facebook version in any case and scrabulous was advertising the board game splendidly.
Seems like a really, really dumb move guaranteed to annoy the end users.
What do HASBRO think they will get from this? They will only get advertising revenue if they can persuade people to visit their new version, and annoying the customers is not a good method to do so.
On the other hand Scrabulous was shut down by the developers themselves in response to the lawsuit, so either they are covering their asses or this is some attempt to make HASBRO reconsider in the face of user outrage.
Typical. For me Scrabulous was one of the only reasons I used FB - I wonder if this will show up in the FB user numbers as a dip?
http://games.yahoo.com/lt
(you need a yahoo login)
totally free. huge regular user base in all skill levels. you get to keep track of your score/ rank over many thousands of games. there are different servers for different skill levels
its a java app. i've had problems with it freezing on ie (so you lose a match and it hurts your overall standing), but it works fine in firefox. you can play time limit games, challenge spelling games, etc.
there are some quirks and minor complaints, griping about the dictionary of course being the biggest, as usual, but by and large i'm very satisfied by the player population and the overall challenge and the easy in/ easy out/ waste 20 minutes nature of play
you frequently encounter players with thousands of games under their belt, and you can check if their win/ loss ratio is suspect or their abandoned games count is suspect (meaning: they jettisoned games in the first few seconds before it hurt their score if they don't like their initial tiles, which is really lame). as for the players with the weird win/loss ratios: i don't understand why someone would cheat at such a frivolous nonmonetary past time, but you encounter such players way more than you would think. i don't get it. is someone designing bots for a CS class? is someone so interested in winning over enjoying themselves? i don't understand it
of course, it's not 100% scrabble, but how it departs from scrabble, such as pseudorandom letter tiles (chosen at the beginning of the game and fixed but from a much larger pool of tiles) is interesting. so some games are brutal because of a bunch of Cs, Is, and Us, and the next game might be surprising because of a surfeit of Js and Zs
i'm very happy with literati for wasting 20 minutes here and there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Facebook is already translated into many languages and there are networks for most countries. While Facebook the corporation may be chartered in the US, it's obvious the leadership thinks of it as a global site.
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
If these guys can do Scrabble so well, why not encourage them to do other Hasbro games in a way that makes Hasbro money?
Stop making sense.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
The parallel is even closer for M:tG fans as there used to be a quite nice piece of software floating around the 'net about 10 years ago called "Magic Suitcase".
Instead of buying it and creating a licensed version that fans would appreciate and support they just killed it outright if memory serves.
crazy dynamite monkey
My mom was kicking my butt, 306 to 278, with just a few tiles to go. I guess I should consider this a reprieve. If you can't win, hope for a tie due to complete system shutdown, right?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Niggle is a freeware Scrabble on the Palm that is fairly vanilla looking but is a far superior implementation of Scrabble to the official Hasbro version, but when they came out with official Scrabble on the Palm the authors of Niggle, of course, pulled it.
The problem I saw with Hasbro/EA Scrabble on Facebook was more of a problem with EA's "add more features that don't add basic functionality" like they butcher every game they touch.
Hasbro's other departments, and specifically Wizards of the Coast which owns the brands for D&D and MTG, have failed to bring a good product to market for the same reasons. Instead of focusing on the basics, they bloat with features that only make the software look and play nice, but cannot mimic the underlying mechanics. Even before Magic Suitcase, there was Apprentice. This was free, widely used, no thrills attached program maintained by fans on their own time so that players online could enjoy the game. It was not based on ad revenue, it was less than 2MB and included TCP socketing. So what did WotC do? Send a Cease & Desist notice to the developers claiming copyright infringement. Two years later they released a product with lots of thrills, over 100 times the size, and a click-intensive program.
Why does it seem like games companies don't know how give their customers what they want?
The feature list provided, the integrated chat, the quick loads, and word list, all describe a sort of a tile based game that is essentially different from scrabble the board game. Really, by Hasbro making an online tile thing, they are infringing on scrabulous's intellectual property. Scrabulous should patent everything about their work, and sue Hasbro for infringement on their invention.
This is my sig.
Deja vu. There used to be a pretty reasonable Tetris on Facebook called Block Star. It was shut down, and replaced with an officially licensed version called Tetris Friends. But no one plays that because it's crap in comparison (and it doesn't work on Macs or under Linux). Sigh.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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!
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.
It's funny how, as far as I've seen, people don't complain when there's a Slashdot story about Perl - yet that is relevant to orders of magnitude fewer people than MySpace or Facebook do.
It's also funny how "cool" means one thing on Slashdot, and quite another in the world at large. Somehow I don't think the two sets overlap much.
#DeleteChrome
And why would that in any way affect their choice of dictionaries? Are some dictionaries illegal in the US?
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?
Copyright does not require innovation, just originality.
Just to expand on this point, if you look at the official scrabble site you'll see that's because Hasbro only own the Scrabble trademark in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it's owned by J.W.Spears and Sons - who don't seem to have a problem with the game. My guess is that the rest of the world will carry on playing Scrabulous.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
In the early 1980's I made a nifty implementation of MasterMind, a game invented (sort of) by Mordecai Meirowitz in 1970, sold to Invicta Plastics, who eventually licensed it to Hasbro. The original board game was based on a pen and paper game, and it has been copied dozens of times in web games and other programs. Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game) I built the game as a developer's teaching aid for drawing into an off-screen device context and some other techniques, but it became quite popular as a diversion. Queries both Invicta and Hasbro about permission to use the look and feel were never answered. I've never asked for nor received any compensation for the game. I've credited all concerned parties prominently in the game. A thorough search of Invicta and Hasbro web sites and catalogs have no mention of the game, it has all but evaporated. When I posted the code on a popular code sharing site (as a teaching aid) I got a very nasty threatening letter from Hasbro. I had to take it out of public distribution, though I still distribute it privately because the code techniques are very useful. Hasbro is (technically) within their rights, though I could make a case by pointing out the other clones and the obsoleteness of the license. The main reason for this post is the tone of the letter -- not professional at all, it was personal, emotional and irrational. Reading it, you would think I had taken a toy from under some tot's Christmas tree. Hasbro sucks.
The bit I haven't yet deciphered (I have RTFA, but it didn't really help) is what exactly the lawsuit claims. It says that it's filed under the DMCA, but not what exactly Hasbro are claiming copyright on. Is a game concept copyrightable? If not, can Scrabulous just remove whatever little bit it is that they are claiming on?
They're not claiming copyright on anything if I understand correctly.
They're claiming trademark infringement. It's likely that if Scrabulous changed its name and perhaps trivially tweaked the gameplay, Hasbro would just bugger off. There are plenty of knock-offs of popular games, they're just renamed and re-themed.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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."
Those are parodies. Scrabulous is a product with similar gameplay and name to Scrabble.
Cynical Idealist
The Scrabble IP isn't owned by Hasbro -- they use it under license from a Mattel subsidiary that owns it. They are probably contractually obligated to 'zealously defend' that IP.
My blog
It's been updated. Apparently the decision to block US and Canada from Scrabulous was the Scrabulous developers' own decision, presumably a pre-emptive move to prevent themselves being sued under US law (or Canadian law, for some reason). Curious that it has occurred at the same time as Hasbro launch their own version - maybe a deal was struck after all..?
Wouldn't that be more of an anti-social networking site?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
the significance of an argument about how web 2.0 apps are changing the business landscape.
He have caps filters and characters-per-line filters but no MBA-speak filters?
I kid, I kid :P
I agree with your post though. I always have wondered how Hasbro, Mattel and some of the other toy companies are staying afloat. It's always amusing when I see an ad for a Wii game or something followed by an ad for...a board game. I guess they make money on families who can't afford video game systems, or have some sort of moral problem with them (there are a lot of parents who think video games "rot their children's minds," turn them into serial killers, etc.).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It would be more accurate to say that Facebook is already sort-of mainly translated into many languages. I use it in Spanish, and at times the mistakes are painful.
To pre-empt those who want to point out that it's Web 2.0 and I should get involved, I have. I've installed the translation module, translated a couple of phrases, and voted on a lot more. But it's not infrequent that when I find a mistranslated phrase the translation module claims not to know anything about it.
Game rules are not copyrightable. 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 protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. See http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
That it's trademark is also important because they MUST defend it, or they lose it, unlike copyrights.
They are finding it difficult to toe the line.
Infuriate left and right
It looks better. Some people have complained about the animations; they don't take that much time, and Hasbro has announced they're going to implement a switch to turn them off, as well as keyboard (based upon user feedback). Hasbro owns the rights to the game, implemented their own version, and are enforcing the rights.
I don't know why everyone has so much hate on for the new version. It looks better, they're fixing up the couple of things people have complained about.
Most importantly, with Scrabulous you had to refresh your page manually, or set up a 2-minute auto refresh. Not great for games with any interactivity. The official Scrabble doesn't need this refresh, it tells you when someone has moved, instantly, which really is a make-or-break feature in my book.
Yes, some games are one-turn-per-day, and each works fine for that. But when you want a play-the-game-now interactively with someone, Scrabulous was a joke.
I don't see it as a big loss, in my opinion. The new one works fine, and should be even better when it's out of beta.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
I don't understand why the Scrabulous folks took an approach that virtually guaranteed that they would be shut down. The rules of the game are not subject to copyright or any other restriction, so anybody can make a Scrabble-like game. The name itself is trade-marked, and the board artwork is copyrighted. That means that all you have to do to be free of IP restrictions is use a clearly distinct name and different artwork. It would not have been difficult to avoid legal problems. Why they didn't is beyond me.
The functional aspects of the game layout are not protected but the non-functional, artistic aspects are. Scrabulous should have been okay if they used a board with the same dimensions and locations for the double word scores and so forth but different colors, fonts, and other details.
That's awesome! I've often thought that there would be this thing, I don't know, like a website. Where you could search for stuff and then FIND it. Kinda like a library card catalogue but for the ENTIRE internet. Wouldn't that be great? Then we wouldn't have to wait years to find stuff out - we could just do a quick search and have the information we wanted. Oh well, maybe sometime in the future.
I just installed Foxyproxy and told it to reroute "http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous" through a free proxy outside of the effected area. http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/
If Hasbro asks, I'm in Brazil.
You don't need facebook. You can play at http://www.scrabulous.com/ - there's even an email version, which will email you when your opponent has played his/her move.
Scrabulous was the reason I originally joined Facebook. When I found that I could play without having a Facebook account, I had my account deleted (mailed them and told them to delete everything!) and I play exclusively using the email version of the game.
T.