Hasbro Finally Drops Scrabulous Lawsuit

The Associated Press reports that Hasbro Inc. has now dropped the lawsuit it launched earlier this year against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Scrabulous, a Scrabble clone that found a sizable following on Facebook. We previously discussed Scrabulous' return to Facebook under a different name, as well as the "official" Scrabble client, which was not exactly well received. Hasbro's IP rights to the game are limited to North America, and the AP story adds: "Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, filed a lawsuit against the brothers in India claiming violations of intellectual property. It was not immediately clear what the status of that lawsuit is."

Comments

I hate that frigging game

[stoolpigeon]

My wife absolutely crushes me every time we play. It was bad enough when she dominated me in physical sports but this is too much. I was really hoping they would get shut down.

Re:I hate that frigging game

[stoolpigeon]

She's brutal with that. She got beat once- and then played in practice mode until she could whip everybody in the family. Really all I've got left is Mario Kart double dash - but nobody wants to play that any more. I just race the console.
 
It's cool though. She's just very competitive and I'm not. But my vocabulary isn't too bad - I thought scrabulous was a real opportunity to dominate. I was very mistaken.

Re:I hate that frigging game

[quarterbuck]

The only way out then is to get used to the idea of Comparative advantage . She may be better than you at everything in absolute terms, but since both of you have only 24 hours in a day, it still is better for you to stick together and interact (play games). You just have to find the game you are the absolute best and she is the absolute worst and play for limited time (so that she does'nt change her comparative advantage).
This is how my economist professor explained the reasoning for marrying an absolutely hot and smart woman.

Re:I hate that frigging game

[jdgeorge]

This is how my economist professor explained the reasoning for marrying an absolutely hot and smart woman.

And yet, to me, the reasoning is similar to what I'd do with a winning lottery ticket: I wouldn't say, "no, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with all that wealth; why don't you keep it?" Instead, I'd say, "yes, thank you, I'll take the 'cash now' option please."

Re:I hate that frigging game

[LandDolphin]

Yeah, what a loser. Stuck with a wife who is smart, good at what she most everything, and makes more money then him. Pfft, really would have to suck to be him.

You can't create certain board layouts anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

You are now constrained in terms of which board layouts you can create in Wordscraper which prevents you from creating a board with the same bonus pattern as the scrabble board.

Some guy has figured out the rules:

http://tinyurl.com/63fwjk

I wouldn't have thought Hasbro had a legal leg to stand on with forcing wordscraper preventing users being able to create certain board layouts, but perhaps wordscraper just bowed to pressure to avoid legal hassle.

Of course they dropped it

[LingNoi]

The damage is done, they've crushed Scrabulous into non-existence, what else is there to do?

Still not convinced lawsuit was valid.

[Xest]

Many law suits have demonstrated that the idea of a game simply can't be copyrighted, only the name and IP. Arguably the only thing Scrabulous could've been caught on legally in this respect was the name, Scrabulous. A court case against someone for using a similar name wont find a sympathetic ear with a judge even then if the company hasn't at least given the defendant the option of changing the name out of court.

Really, I think the best they could've done legally is taken them to court over the name had they been unwilling to change it after an initial request out of court.

The lawsuit was probably there simply as a scare tactic to try and scare them into ceasing and desisting. This scare tactic worked to an extent, but now we're approaching the time they'd actually have to go to court and that they'd actually have to state their case they've backed off, because they know it was unwinnable based on similar past court cases.

If you could copyright a first person shooter where you have to fight off an alien invasion for example, then that would kill off most the FPS market. If someone however created an FPS called Doomer and it had all the weapons and characters of the original then this would be a valid court case.

The key is to ensure the only thing that's copied is the idea and concept and that the name and assets do not closely resemble the originals.

Re:Still not convinced lawsuit was valid.

[tomhudson]

Many law suits have demonstrated that the idea of a game simply can't be copyrighted, only the name and IP.

Law suits don't demonstrate this - it's the law at the US Copyright Office

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 protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.

In other words, the artwork is copyrightable, but neither the rules of the game, nor the method of play, is. That's simply the law.