Hasbro Finally Drops Scrabulous Lawsuit 51
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."
You can't create certain board layouts anymore (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Still not convinced lawsuit was valid. (Score:5, Informative)
Law suits don't demonstrate this - it's the law at the US Copyright Office [copyright.gov]
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.
Re:I hate that frigging game (Score:5, Informative)
This is how my economist professor explained the reasoning for marrying an absolutely hot and smart woman.