Game over for Scrabulous?
“For Facebook, S-c-r-a-b-u-l-o-u-s spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e,” p2pnet posted recently.
Trouble with a capital T.
Scrabulous is a Scrabble knock-off created by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from India.
It was popular with Facebook fans and joint Scrabble owners Mattel and Hasbro told it to, “expeditiously remove the game, claiming Scrabulous infringes their copyright,” we said.
Now, “”Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice,” says a Facebook message.
Game over?
“Hasbro may face a public-relations backlash, as some users even said they wouldn’t be buying any more if its games for their kids because of the tactics,” says the Vancouver Sun, noting:
“The original Scrabble game was developed in 1931 by unemployed architect Alfred Butts.
“Players use randomly selected letter tiles to spell words on a 15-by-15 grid, scoring points based on the letters used, the length of the word and where the letters are placed.”
Stay tuned.
.
.Stumble It!
p2pnet – Scrabble sues Scrabulous, July 25, 2008
Vancouver Sun -Facebook shuts down Scrabulous game, July 30, 2008
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July 30th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
clear case of copyright infringement depending on when the original copyright was filed. (1931) is this when the copyright was filed or just when the designer came up with the idea?
if its in the public domain then its a different matter.
July 30th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Clear case of not purchasing Hasbro or Mattel products again.
They could have, SHOULD have found a way to settle this.
If they steal this facebook app and rebrand under their name it
should be avoided like the plague.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
There’s 1000s of similar games, as there are with all popular originals that have many clones. The problem is this one uses a similar name. Scradiculous.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
How many clones are there of Mario, pac-man, space invaders; not to mention many other originals which have so many blatant ripoff clones, or with minor variations, but nothing was ever done about it, unless they used the same name.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
“Trouble with a capital T.”
And that rhymes with “C” and that stands for “copyright”!
July 31st, 2008 at 2:49 am
Doesn’t matter who’s to blame. The medium is the message and Hasbro and Mattel have told me that they don’t deserve my business.
August 4th, 2008 at 5:39 am
MAKING AVAILABLE
(1931)
If the images of the game Scrabble were published and copyrighted in 1931 – in the usa – the copyright expired in 1958 (1931 plus 28 years). Then the copyright could/may have been renovated for an additional period of 67 years, to 2025 (1958 + 28 years). So the copyright duration is of 94 years.
Does a 94 year copyright duration incentive promote the making available of more works – allegedly the reason for copyrights – many years after the author is dead? Of course not.
Too long copyrights only reduce the availability of the work to the people. If Scrabble has gone into public domain many years ago as a result of reasonable copyright duration, there would be many companies making available the game cheaply – and free on the Internet – and making available is the whole purpose of the copyright incentive.
Copyrights are good, but 70 years after the death – as is in current law – of the last author’s death is ridiculous. To show how ridiculous it has become, an 80 year old person completing a book could put his illiterate 15 year old great grandchild as a co-author. Then if the grandchild lives to 100 years the copyright duration for the work will be 155 years. And who benefits, assuming the work is an eternal best seller? Only the illiterate co-author and the book publishing corporation. The public? Who cares.