Scrabble Sues Scrabulous
Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 25th, 2008 10:32 AM
Yesterday Brad Stone reported that Hasbro has filed a lawsuit against Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the developers behind the popular Scrabulous application. Just last week the company launched the legitimate version of Scrabble on Facebook. The application has attracted over 8,000 active daily users so far but it will be a long road before the application is competing directly with Scrabulous.
Hasbro stated, “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.” Does this mean we will soon see the end of Scrabulous? Probably not anytime soon. Back in January there were reports that Hasbro was already suing Scrabulous but no agreement was reached and it became unclear whether or not anything was going to happen.
By last week the company launched the official version of the application and there was no signs of an ongoing dispute between the Scrabulous application developers and Facebook. It appears that with Hasbro realizing how challenging it will be to beat Scrabulous directly so rather than just try to compete in the open market, Scrabulous is going to try and use the law for protection. While it’s not necessarily a bad strategy, it is unclear why Hasbro has waited so long to file a suit.
I’m sure we will be hearing more about this over the coming weeks. For now, Scrabulous is still up and running. We will have to see if it is going to stay that way.
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July 25th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Here’s my opinion. Hasbro sued Scrabulous in January, then they realised that it would lead to bad PR and they wouldn’t get anything out of it. So they temporarily postponed the lawsuit and asked EA to make a Scrabble application for themselves. Now that EA finished and the application has been released, Hasbro has gone back to suing Scrabulous.
They always planned to get rid of Scrabulous. The article talks about how they “briefly” met with the Scrabulous owners, but in my opinion there was no serious intent to collaborate. I think that they just did it to try to look like the good guys and to bide some time before their application was finished and released.
Hasbro knows that a law suit against Scrabulous will probably take a few months at best. That’s why they have asked Facebook directly to remove Scrabulous, hoping that it will be the weak link. I hope that Facebook doesn’t fold so easily.
It’s a typical big company policy. They don’t understand the internet and they certainly don’t understand the social internet. So their first response is to start suing.
July 25th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Reverting back to sueing because their app didnt take off
July 25th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Here’s my opinion. Hasbro sued Scrabulous in January, then they realised that it would lead to bad PR and they wouldn’t get anything out of it. So they temporarily postponed the lawsuit and asked EA to make a Scrabble application for themselves. Now that EA finished and the application has been released, Hasbro has gone back to suing Scrabulous.
They always planned to get rid of Scrabulous. The article talks about how they “briefly” met with the Scrabulous owners, but in my opinion there was no serious intent to collaborate. I think that they just did it to try to look like the good guys and to bide some time before their application was finished and released.
Hasbro knows that a law suit against Scrabulous will probably take a few months at best. That’s why they have asked Facebook directly to remove Scrabulous, hoping that it will be the weak link. I hope that Facebook doesn’t fold so easily.
It’s a typical big company policy. They don’t understand the internet and they certainly don’t understand the social internet. So their first response is to start suing.
July 25th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Reverting back to sueing because their app didnt take off
July 29th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Looks like Scrabulous is dead for the time being for users in the US and Canada…will be interesting to see how the next several weeks will play out.
July 29th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Looks like Scrabulous is dead for the time being for users in the US and Canada…will be interesting to see how the next several weeks will play out.
July 29th, 2008 at 10:14 am
[...] signs don’t look too good for Scrabulous who was sued last week by Hasbro. While we don’t officially know that this is the cause of the application being shut down, we [...]