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Hasbro Sues Makers of Scrabble-Like Scrabulous
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 24, 2008 04:36 PM
from the cryin'-shame-continues dept.
from the cryin'-shame-continues dept.
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."
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Your Rights Online: Hasbro Using DMCA on Facebook Game Apps 210 comments
Boggle Addict writes "Rather than participating in the online gaming market, Hasbro is suppressing it with litigation. Scrabulous, a Scrabble imitation, is already fighting to prevent being shut down. Today, Hasbro sent out DMCA notices to other apps on Facebook, including Bogglific, a Boggle imitation. Copyright law has has always held very limited protections for games. This may be opening a can of worms for Hasbro.
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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead 395 comments
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.
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Hasbro Finally Drops Scrabulous Lawsuit 51 comments
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."
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My turn? (Score:5, Funny)
I R S F T T O P S Q
Re:My turn? (Score:5, Funny)
They are mad because you get more points for making "Scrabulous" than for "Scrabble".
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Re:My turn? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:My turn? HasBRO doesn't want to become a (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:My turn? (Score:4, Funny)
PROFIT ?
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So in Scrabble-like terms... (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't seem very logical to me. Why don't they just buy it?
Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would cost money. This way they get money.
That would have also validated the use of their game rules / board design (which are copyrighted or whatever). That could cost them their registration. Plus it would only encourage others to do this kind of thing to get some quick cash.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't copyright a game. [copyright.gov] Hasbro is suing them over the trademark. Scrabulous should have used a name that doesn't sound like Scrabble, then there would be nothing Hasbro could do. Perhaps Scrabulous could change their name to Crapple.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Informative)
You can't copyright a game, but you *can* copyright a game board. Scrabulous used the Scabble game board (and that was a big part of why it was successful with existing Scrabble players), so they're probably doomed - it's a genuine old-school copyright violation, no DMCA required.
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Game Patents (Score:5, Informative)
You can't copyright a game, but you *can* copyright a game board.
You also apparently can patent game mechanics [uspto.gov].
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:4, Informative)
You can copyright a game.
No, you can't. Remember, a game is essentially its rules. You can copyright a description of those rules (maybe, it depends) but you cannot copyright the underlying rules themselves. The rules are a method for playing the game, you see, and that's expressly non-copyrightable subject matter, per 17 USC 102(b). Art associated with the game (e.g. the picture on the box, the shape of the pieces, etc.) can be copyrightable, but again, not to the extent that they're dictated by the rules.
Hasbro sued Kellogg for having a card matching game on their cereal boxes as part of a Finding Nemo promotion, saying it too closely resembled their Memory card game.
Got a link? I'd be interested to see what it was about, specifically.
Wizards of the Coast even has a patent
You can patent games -- it's just another method, after all -- but it requires that the rules are patentable. That means that they have to be novel and nonobvious. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to happen that often. Besides, since patents expire relatively quickly, it doesn't matter in this case.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you can't copyright a game. The Kelloggs thing was a trademark claim which was settled out of court so who knows how that would have went. Your other example is a patent issue. I guess it needs to be repeated, once more, that patents, trademarks and copyright are all different things. Kelloggs link [about.com]
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:4, Insightful)
You start claiming "You can copyright a game", the you start talking about patents. Do you understand the (vast) difference?
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Informative)
You can copyright any drawing, painting or other artwork, photograph, etc. Copyright is not limited to text.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't they just buy it?
They'd rather let the world know you don't F with Hasbro.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: As the saying goes... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:4, Funny)
Hasbro: We'll show 'em! No one plays games with us!
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From the article:
Mr. Blecher said that EA had a âoea brief conversationâ with the Scrabulous creators about working together but that ultimately the company decided it wanted to control the game itself and develop it across various technology platforms.
Too many variables here but one mention of EA and I am ready to judge the whole episode in favor of the Indian brothers. Maybe the Indians opposed the ads? :P
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They probably don't want to appear as if they're rewarding people who they believe stole their intellectual property. That would just inspire others to create even more Scrabble clones in hope of getting bought by Hasbro.
Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:4, Funny)
You people Boggle the mind.
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Buy it from Whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Trademark your game name
2) Just buy (it) your trademark from... those violating your trademark?
3) Profit!!!
With super-human logic skills like that, I imagine your post getting moderated up by others with an equally stuning level of logic. I also imagine the corollary to be true, as I haven't seen moderation points in years.
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Re:Buy it from Whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post does not describe this situation. This does:
1) Trademark your game name
2) Let someone else invoke it while doing lots of cool stuff and acquiring millions of users
3) Buy the millions of users at a really good price by making the someone else choose between a buy-out and a lawsuit.
4) Profit!!!
Makes more sense, yeah?
Parent
Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, there is a very odd attitude to copyright on Slashdot. We're not talking about patent trolling here, we are talking about a company which owns a trademark which is being infringed by another company. The infringement isn't even subtle, its a play on the very product they have adapted for online use. We aren't talking about a broad sue everyone who designs a word game attitude, we talking about defending a tradename - one which they are evidently in the process of cashing in on with EA.
IANAL but this is about how customers identify with a product and a tradename and in this case there is a strong possibility that a large proportion of this 2.3 million users aren't aware there is a distinction. There are cases where a trademark can enter the lexicon, such as Hoover in the UK (for vacuum cleaner), I wouldn't have said this was one.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:5, Informative)
According to Hasbro, the very name "Scrabulous" infringes the Hasbro trademark, since (they say) it's confusingly similar.
That one might be debatable, but they also claim that scrabulous.com used to have META tags saying things like "free online scrabble". If that's true, then I'd think the case is pretty open-and-shut. I tried to check at archive.org, but it seems the Scrabulous people blocked archive.org from their site. (Hmm, that doesn't exactly reek of good faith, does it?)
Yeah, I doubt Hasbro will get any money out of them. However, Facebook isn't based in India, so the Facebook app will certainly be taken down if Hasbro wins this case, and that's the main thing they appear to want.
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Re:Why don't they just buy it? (Score:4, Informative)
As valid as your point is with respect to Intelectual Property and copyright - they aren't suing someone on the grounds that they are making a word game but because they are trying (at least in Hasbros opinion) to associate with their trademark - which has to be defended or can be lost. If the product still sells under that name for 60 years then why wouldn't they defend it?
Incedentaly the original application for a patent on the game was rejected [mattel.com].
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I love Scrabulous, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I love Scrabulous, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Yes, it's too old. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell yes there's doubt. Scrabble was designed and first marketed in 1938. By any reasonable definition of the "protected for a limited time" aspect of intellectual property principle, Scrabble should be in the public domain by now.
Inventing or creating something should not give you, your heirs, and the people who bought it from you, and the people who bought it from them the right to make exclusive profit off it for the rest of time.
The dude who invented Scrabble is long dead. Time to let others play.
Can you imagine if we we still had to pay royalties to whatever company bought the rights to Shakespeare's estate every time a school drama club wanted to put on Hamlet?
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Re:Yes, it's too old. (Score:5, Informative)
Trademarks do not expire, nor is there a strong argument that they should, other than after a company stops selling the product.
The test in trademark law is "likelihood of confusion." Which is to say, if you went up to a man in the street, and said, "We have a game where you spell words using tiles on a crossword like board, and get points for the letters, and it's called Scrabulous" is there a reasonable chance a person might confuse that with Scrabble, the trademarked Hasbro game?
I have to say it sure sounds like yes. And if it's a yes (and depending on how good your lawyers are it doesn't have to be a very strong yes) then the case is pretty clear.
Trademarks don't expire because aside from protecting the company, they are viewed as also protecting the public from being tricked into buying counterfeit goods. Of course, sometimes the public is better off with counterfeit goods, but the law does not take that view.
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Re:Yes, it's too old. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I love Scrabulous, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And what intellectual property would that be? The trademark is pretty much the only claim they can make, but I think that most reasonable adults would read "Scrabulous" as meaning "Scrabble(TM)-like, but not Scrabble(TM)". Copyrights would only apply to their artwork and specific wording of the rules. You can't trademark facts. And any patents would have expired decades ago.
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Re:I love Scrabulous, but.... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. There is a serious doubt, at least on one of their claims.
They are raising two basic claims, under trademark law and copyright law. The trademark claim is basically that consumers will be confused into thinking this had something to do with Hasbro. The similarity of the names -- "Scrabble" v. "Scrabulous" doesn't help much. But, changing the name solves that problem.
The harder case for Hasbro is the copyright claim -- games have "thin" copyrights. In general, the only elements that are protected are (a) the text of the instructions and (b) the graphical elements. So, if Scrabulous didn't copy the Scrabble instructions and didn't copy the graphical elements, they should be fine.
Even on the graphical elements, if there are a small number of ways of expressing something, that expression is not protected either. So, for example, you need some way of putting both the point value and letter on each tile. With a small number of ways of doing so, I suspect that the tiles themselves are not protected. It's possible that Scrabulous might be dinged for copying Hasbro's choice of colors for the squares.
I have not played Scrabulous, so I just have no idea how this plays out.
Great blog post at http://www.thelegality.com/archives/11 [thelegality.com]
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Re:I love Scrabulous, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's the problem - to some extent they do both, to the point where the game is recognizably Scrabble with the serial numbers badly filed off.
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Re:I love Scrabulous, but.... (Score:5, Funny)
This game is older than I am. How can there still be a patent on it?
Trademark issues abound for sure...
But Patents? Puleeeze...
It's like they think they have some sort of... Monopoly.
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This is what I am worried about.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is what I am worried about.. (Score:4, Informative)
Scrabulous ... attracts over 600,000 daily users and gives the brothers $25,000 of advertising a month.
[http://www.thetrendwatch.com/2008/01/31/scrabble-vs-scrabulous/ [thetrendwatch.com]]
;)
If you're not selling your app or ads on it, you're likely safe...but IANAL
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Best thing for Hasbro to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is probably to ignore damages (or settle out of court in a way that the brothers aren't pissed off). They ought to then have Scrabulous disabled and then work with the brothers and EA to migrate Scrabulous users over to the official Scrabble app.
Free publicity+userbase >> damages
Cheers!
Does Hasbro even make games still? (Score:3, Insightful)
Still alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [www.isc.ro] instead.
Counter Sue (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Hasbro only avail in 2 countries. Thanks Hasbro. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd have more sympathy for the Scrabulous people.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they hadn't used the word "Scrabble" in the URL for the single player - aka, practice - version of the game up until Hasbro started making noise; for all I know, they may have used Scrabble elsewhere on their site or in their meta tags. That alone should merit trademark infringement.
Sorry, I'm very much for things like abolition of software patents and shortening of copyright terms - and I'm aware that game play cannot be patented - however these guys were obviously trying to benefit from the image of Scrabble. They went so far as to use the term to refer to their game, nevermind trying to actively dissuade people from confusing. The makers of Scrabulous acted unethically and I believe illegally.
FreeCiv (Score:4, Interesting)
The question was posed: isn't this blatant copyright infringement?
And their answer was - maybe not. Although it's clear that you can copyright graphics and sounds, and you can copyright a story and a plot, and you can copyright code, and you can copyright maps - it isn't clear whether you can copyright a ruleset.
It isn't clear, for example, whether you can copyright the concept of turning a card sideways to increase a number used to play other cards. It isn't clear whether the concept of a 2-D character jumping from one platform to another, and losing a life if he doesn't make it, could have been copyrighted.
Maybe this will clear some things up. Scrabble, after all, has no real proprietary art beyond their logo maybe the font used on the tiles. It's just rules, and nothing more. Can you copyright a concept? (Actually, that sounds more like something you'd use a patent for).
Re:Scrabble (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Scrabble (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but I do not feel any of the so-called intellectual property associated with this game should be in force except for the name.
Why not? Copyrights are in force for longer than 50 years. This is being argued as a copyright and trademark violation. And why shouldn't copyright apply to a game? It applies to restaurant menus, email memos, blog posts, napkin doodles, finger paintings, and so on. Why can't it apply to a board game?
Granted, the idea of a crossword game where you construct words from pieces shouldn't be copy protected. But the precise rules, layout of a particular board, etc should be.
There are lots of scrabble-like games that should not be found infringing... but scrabulous?
Scrabulous has double and tripple letter and word scores in the same places on a board that is the same size and shape, from a set of pieces with the same letter frequency, and the game follows exactly the same rules.
It looks like scrabble. It plays like scrabble. Its even almost-but-not-quite called scrabble.
How is that different from writing a novel entitled Lord of the Bracelets, you know the one? Its about the Dark Lord Soron who forged 9 bracelets for men, 7 for dwarfs (not dwarves), and 3 for elfs (not elves), and one master bracelet for himself, which was lost in a great war and then found by Seegul... from whom it was stolen by Billy and then passed on to his adopted nephew Frobo...who carried it to Riverdell with his friend Samsmart while being pursued by braceletwraiths... and from there a great journey was undertaken by the council to form the Fellowship of the Bracelets to carry the ring to Doom Mountain and destroy it...
There's writing fantasy that was influenced and inspired by Tolkien... and then there is Lord of the Bracelets.
Like my "Lord of the Bracelets" Scrabulous deserves to be found infringing and shut down.
If they want to sue over trademark infringement over the name, fine.
That's part of it too.
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Re: New News (for once) (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Hasbro withdrew their prior lawsuit against Scrabulous *until* such time as it could put its own service up on Facebook. Hasbro's version is now live, and they have recommenced their suit. Ergo, this is new news.
Way to pick the ONE article in the history of /. that is actually *not* a dupe.
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