Copyright Law

Scrabbled

By Andrew Raff, Esq.

I was too busy playing Scrabulous last week to blog about the complaint filed by Hasbro against the creators of Scrabulous, the online word game that happens to share the board layout and rules of play of Scrabble.

Complaint in Hasbro v. RJ Softwares (08cv06567, NYSD filed Jul. 24) for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, trademark dilution and common law unfair competition.

In addition, Hasbro served Facebook with a DMCA takedown notice.

Facebook forwarded the takedown notice to the Scrabulous developers who prevented access to the application for addicts users in the US and Canada.

In the NY Times Bits Blog, Brad Stone reports Hasbro Notches Triple-Word Score Against Scrabulous With ‘Lawsuit': "'Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,' said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, in a statement. "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.'"

Wendy Seltzer argues that a game like Scrabble is not a sufficiently creative form of expression to be copyrightable. Scrabbling for Legal Rationalism: No Copyright for Games: "So the 'methods of operation' — the rules of the game, should be uncopyrightable no matter how intricate. Their particular expression in an elegantly written manual may be protected, but another is free to extract the underlying ideas and rewrite the manual to describe an identically played game."

More than anything in the short term, the takedown will be the best promotion for Hasbro to drive traffic to the licensed Scrabble application (which, surprisingly, is dreadfully slow and ugly compared with the simple and relatively elegant Scrabulous application.)

Full post as published by IPTAblog on July 29, 2008 (boomark / email).