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Scrabulous Returns To Facebook, As Wordscraper
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 31, 2008 03:37 PM
from the annoying-but-beats-years-of-court dept.
from the annoying-but-beats-years-of-court dept.
porcupine8 writes "Good news for those that have had a hole in their heart (and Facebook profile) since Hasbro forced Facebook to remove Scrabulous over copyright and trademark issues. The creators of Scrabulous have wasted no time in tweaking the game and have launched a new tile-based game called Wordscraper. In addition to changing the name, they have changed the board look so as not to directly copy the colors, etc of a Scrabble board, and have even made provisions for players to create their own board layout! Interested Scrabulous fans can add the application now. Only time will tell if the changes were extensive enough to keep Hasbro's lawyers at bay."
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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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Copyright broken (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a pretty good example of broken copyright laws. How long has Scrabble been out, 60 years? And because of the crazy long copyright terms now, innovation is being stifled. This is not what copyright was intended for...
Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Informative)
Not copyright. Trademark infringement [timesonline.co.uk]. Entirely different legal structure...
Parent
Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Informative)
No, copyright too. You can't copyright the idea of how you play the game, but you can copyright the board artwork. Of course, you can significantly aletr the board artwork so that it's different enough to avoid copyright infringement without changing how the game is played. Most game ripoffs do just this.
Sadly, the Scrabulous guys didn't take this step, and they could still be facing a lot of trouble over that. The new game solves this problem - guess they finally bothered to care what minimal steps they needed to take to be legal.
Parent
Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing broken about this. At all. This is, in fact, exactly as it should be. Otherwise, all someone would have to do to duplicate my game would be to change the title.
Game designs and rules are unprotected. Titles, presentation, artwork and appearances are protected. This is ideal. No brokenness here.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're claiming a failure to trademark or copyright chess or shogi implies trademark or copyright is broken?
As for the "why no knockoff Scrabble", it's because people don't want to play a knockoff, they want to play Scrabble. If you want a proper example...
Witness the multitude of playing cards available; every single one is interchangeable, but each one is still protected by trademark.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hasbro has an ancient game that they has spent zero time innovating on. A market demand opens for the game on the Intertubes and Hasbro failed to identify and fulfill that niche.
These other guys built it, made money off it, and likely sent money Hasbro's way that they would not have otherwise had (new players wanting an offline version). I highly doubt people avoided buying the game because they could play it online...they wouldn't have FOUND the game if it wasn't online.
Hasbro has been r
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WHAT MONEY?
The money you mentioned three sentences later:
These other guys built it, made money off it
I can't believe the furor over this. The only way that it could have been more clear that the Scrabulous developers were profiting off of intellectual property that did not belong to them would be if the app had literally been named "Scrabble" and scanned in the artwork directly from Hasbro's product.
Whether you believe intellectual property, as a legal concept, is just or not is a different issue, but unde
Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody, just like Shakespeare and The Odessey. A basic familiarity with the law might help you here. Nobody ever filed for or was granted protection on those items, and if they had been, they'd be several thousands of years expired by now.
Brand recognition. People periodically try to replace Scrabble. It happens every several years.
This is primarily an indication that you don't know much about the games market. Games that perenially get copied include Uno, Sorry, Yahtzee, Connect 4, Mille Bornes, Scrabble, Rubik's Cube, Battleship, and on and on the list goes.
Perhaps you don't understand market forces. Clones aren't absent because they're illegal. They're absent because nobody buys them.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nobody, just like Shakespeare and The Odessey. A basic familiarity with the law might help you here. Nobody ever filed for or was granted protection on those items, and if they had been, they'd be several thousands of years expired by now.
That is just insane. What about the ancestors of those great authors and game creators. Why shouldn't they have the right to protect their forefathers creations and make sure that they aren't misused, not to mention profiteered on.
I hereby suggest a slight change to the copyright law. How does an even 10000 year retroactive copyright law sound. I think that is a nice and even number that should adequatly protect the rights of the creator and his progeny, while still being constitutional. Copyright ensures t
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you keep all the discs upright, you don't. Disc orientation is irrelevant, whereas in Scarabble it's critical. Words with upside down and slanted letters would inhibit the fun of the game. No making italic words isn't worth extra points! ;-)
Re:Copyright broken (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, sure you can. You just can't steal their title or artwork.
I'd be a lot more inclined to take you seriously if you were at least getting the right branch of the law. This is not and never was a copyright issue.
No, that's patents. Copyright has nothing to do with innovation, and this is neither a copyright nor a patent issue. Please settle down until you have at least a basic familiarity with the laws or case in question. This is a waste of time.
Parent
Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, in this case I think the claim was that Scrabulous was infringing upon the Scrabble trademark. IMHO trademarks *should* last as long as the company is in operation. There's no reason why a company should have to lose its trade name over the course of time.
Parent
Re:Copyright broken (Score:4, Informative)
... and that's how the law works: don't protect your trandemark and you lose it, as happened with "escalator" for example.
Or, you can make chemical weapons for the losing side in a war and lose your trademark to the victor, as happened to Bayer with "aspirin" and "heroin". ;)
Parent
Re:Copyright broken (Score:4, Insightful)
"after the creator/inventor is dead should the copyright still be in place?"
In fairness, it probably should. Otherwise I could see it being encouragement for some people to try and make the copyright holder dead in order to better evade it.
Death is also problematic when corporations are able to hold copyrights because it's not something they are subject to. If you're waiting for my immortal corporation to die in order for the copyright to expire, you'll be waiting a very long time.
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Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Informative)
You think wrong. It's not a copyright issue at all, and there is no time frame attached at all. The issue is that Scrabulous was a brand ripoff. Game clones are okay. Brand clones aren't.
Copyright and trademark are about as related as boats and cars. Please put more effort into debate. It's really annoying for a debate about cars to have people keep saying "but the problem is the water level in the lake." Trademarks do not, and should not, expire. It doesn't matter if Microsoft has been around for 80 years; nobody else should ever be able to claim to be Microsoft. This is a trademark issue because the company needs to be able to protect the brand. Scrabble clones can be released. Scrabble, the brand, is still S+R / Hasbro's property.
If you don't understand the difference between copyright/trademark, or between a product and a brand, you really need to stay out of discussions like this.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
they didn't claim to be 'scrabble'. They claimed to be 'scrabulous'. Is this the 5 8ths rule? if you use more than the larger half (in the case of odd numbers) or one more than half (in the case of even numbers) of the letters of someone else's trademark in consecutive order then you're in breach of it? Because I see all sorts of problems for microstar and anyone who sells a generic microwave.
If scrabulous were a Hasbro product it would have been called 'Scrabble' or 'Scrabble online', it would not have bee
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How about the artwork, colors, layout, and font?
Does the fact that they changed all of the above, as well as the name, indicate something about the issues at stake?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because this is not a copyright issue, there is no sixty year timeframe involved.
As a game designer, I would like to remind you that in the eyes of the law, for a very good reason, game designs are not art.
Incidentally, Scrabble was clonable the first day it was released. You just had to use a different name and color the board differently.
Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just going by what the various articles have said. Like this [pcworld.com] one, which says "News wire service Reuters is reporting Hasbro and Mattel are demanding that Facebook remove the popular Facebook application Scrabulous due to copyright infringement." Or this [cnet.com] one, which says "Hasbro on Thursday filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application, which boasts an astonishing half-million daily users." Or this [nytimes.com] one, which says "Hasbro, the Rhode Island company that owns the trademark to the 60-year-old board game, Scrabble, on which Scrabulous is closely based, has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ..."
But, hey, some random stranger on Slasdot assures me this has nothing to do with copyright, so I guess I'll just go with that.
As an intelligent human being who has actually looked around and noticed what happens in the real world, I would like to remind you that a can of Campbell's soup can be art. Art is not a thing, it is the act of creation and appreciation. I've even taken some pretty artistic dumps in my day.
Spend more time actually reading up on the subject we are commenting on, and less dispensing unsolicited advise to people who didn't ask for it.
Parent
Re:Copyright broken (Score:4, Interesting)
Games are not subject to copyright. (The binaries of computer games are, but that's a seperate issue.) This is a trademark issue, and no amount of trademarking their title will make any difference to Hasbro.
The facebook traffic is a drop in the bucket in the Scrabble world. This is really about protecting the Scrabble copyright, so that newspapers can't use the name. If Hasbro didn't say "stop it", other people would be able to say that the trademark was out of defense and therefore invalid.
None of this has anything to do with copyright.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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Re:Copyright broken (Score:5, Insightful)
If you define 'innovation' as copying someone else's idea in almost every detail.
Parent
DIY boards = infinite cleverness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DIY boards = infinite cleverness (Score:4, Funny)
Meh, now Hasbro is going to be mad. Not only you get more points for making Scrabulous when compared to making Scrabble, now you can get even more by making Wordscraper!
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hexagonal scrabble? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hexagonal scrabble? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hexagonal scrabble? (Score:5, Insightful)
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confused (Score:2, Interesting)
Scrabulous is stil available for me, I'm in the UK.
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It could have gone a lot better.... (Score:5, Interesting)
So far, I like it. The custom boards are going to take some getting used to. I am in one game where every tile appears to be a double word score or more, and we are seeing scores of 4000 in some places.
I much prefer the sparse tile versions, where it takes a LOT of planning to get a good score.
Right now, i don't like it as much as scrabble, but I am willing to keep playing until things start to settle.
In my personal opinion, scrabulous was always in clear violation of the law (I am not interested in discussing the ethics of that), and the takedown was inevitable.
If Hasbro had learned from scrabulous instead of acting like spazzes, I would have switched to playing their client.
They needed to release a client equal in speed, slickness and functionality. Then they should have negotiated a wrap up period of several days with the makers of scrabulous, where no new games could be created, but existing games could be wrapped up.
They did neither, and you won't see me switching to play their version as a result.
Use this original Scrabble layout then... (Score:4, Informative)
http://apps.facebook.com/wordscraper/?action=newgame&similarto=54248 [facebook.com]
I know I'd rather play a real Scrabble layout on Wordscraper than to use anything else. Enjoy.
Parent
Re:Use this original Scrabble layout then... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:It could have gone a lot better.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I also park illegally on occasion, and sometimes drive a few miles above the speed limit. I have been known file my taxes late, and have stolen music by downloading it. Sometimes I accidentally throw away paper without recycling it.
Scrabulous was a popular, well implemented version of a game I own no less than 4 boards for. i probably have purchased anywhere from 10 -15 boards over the past 20 years.
I enjoyed it, so I played it. Now that wordscraper is available, I will play that.
Those are all illegal, getting caught has penalties, and I know that. I may not agree with the laws, but when I get caught I pay the consequences, without whining or trying to come up with some sort of convoluted justification for my actions.
Not all laws are equal in my books. Murder is not a law I break with the same equanimity as a local parking ordinance.
If you have managed to live your life ethically pure, then I applaud you.
Parent
I actually registered on FaceBook (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not a big fan of social anything, but I actually registered on face book and downloaded the wordscraper client. I did this in my way of protest to Hasbro and their heavy handed stupidity. With that being said, the wordscraper client is buggy (it is in beta to be fair) but it sure is fun.
How could a company like Hasbro, hiring a company like EA mess up something that should be relatively easy to convert into a program. I am not a programmer, but I would think that a game like Scrabble would be easy to make into an online game. Certainly easier then something like Age of Conan.
DK
Would fruit of the poisonous tree play into this? (Score:2)
Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
A
B
O
U
TIME
Good Exposure (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
prolly hard since they've already said they made $25,000+ a month from Scrabulous [cnn.com]. I think if I were the guys I'd be begging Hasbro to buy the game from them for a few bucks rather than lose a lawsuit and lose all the money they've made and the game itself.
Wordscraper also wins the word score! (Score:5, Funny)
Wordscraper = 19
A better choice of letters in more than one way.
Dropped the ball (Score:2)
If they spent all of that money they wasted on lawyers instead on developers they could have released the version that lets you define your own board layout & stole the thunder back. Instead they're going to become the assholes that don't want anyone to have fun & a company a serious lack of innovation as far as Scrabble is concerned.
Way to go Hasboro !
ABBCELRS (Score:4, Funny)
This is over. (Score:5, Interesting)
Scrabulous was taken down because the name and visual presentation were too similar. Game mechanics are explicitly not protected by any branch of law. (In fact, I warned them in email six months ago that this was coming, and that they should rename/reskin their app.)
Hasbro may try to sue again, but from here, if they do, it's barratry. Wordscraper is now safe.
Wordscrapper?? (Score:2)
No, Wordscraper (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
is it just me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:single player (Score:4, Informative)
The Scrabulous [scrabulous.com] site has a practice version available which allows you to play by yourself or against a computer. I'm guessing Wordscaper will have the same thing once they fix themselves up.
Parent