The popular Facebook game Scrabulous made a comeback of sorts on Thursday, sporting a new name, new look and new set of rules in the hope of avoiding infringement complaints from the owners of Scrabble.
This week, Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of India asked Facebook to block the online application under pressure from Hasbro Inc., which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America. The company had filed a copyright lawsuit, saying the application bore too much resemblance to the venerable board game.
In response, the developers rolled out Wordscraper. The game's board is made up of circles instead of square tiles, and the point system is arranged differently. Wordscraper also allows users to fully customize their own board, determining the shape and point values.
The game's face-lift may not be enough to save the Agarwalla brothers from the pending infringement lawsuit, said Henry Sneath, a Pittsburgh intellectual property attorney who is president of the Voice of the Defense Bar, a group of 22,000 defense lawyers.
"Even though they have tweaked a number of rules for the game, there is still a substantial amount of details that are similar," Sneath said. "I don't think it saves them from further questions."
When asked about the new game, Hasbro said in a statement that it evaluates every situation on a case-by-case basis and will "act appropriately when necessary."
Copyright laws don't protect ideas but the expressions of the ideas, Sneath said, and judges will be looking at whether the developers relied on the original game of Scrabble to create Wordscraper.
"It's still a 15-by-15 board, and you get seven letters with point value," Sneath said. "Here they have changed some of the rules, but the overall premise is pretty much the same."
With the new application heavily promoted on Facebook Thursday, the game quickly garnered several thousand daily users, a far cry from the half a million fans Scrabulous had. Some users said they were confused about the new rules, prompting the developers to promise to improve the look and feel of the game by Friday.
The sanctioned version of the game developed by Electronic Arts Inc. also attracted a few followers, while some users vowed to boycott it.
Scrabulous, one of the first applications allowed on Facebook after the site was opened to outside developers, generated a cult-like following and attracted thousands of players to its Web site, scrabulous.com, which remains active, even though it is named in the lawsuit.
In a copyright and trademark lawsuit filed last week to the U.S. District Court in New York, Hasbro said the name and the promotion of Scrabulous has caused "confusion, mistake and deception" that the Agarwallas were licensed by the company, which owns the rights for the 77-year-old game. Toymaker Mattel, which owns the rights of the game in the rest of the world, has filed a similar lawsuit in India.
"This is an unfortunate event and not something that we are very pleased about, especially as Mattel has been pursuing the matter in Indian courts for the past few months," Jayant Agarwalla said in an e-mail. "We will sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come."
I bolded some key points, since you're obv a little slow.
I guess a quick email to HASBRO will clear this up for all of us.
