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Scrabulous removed, but returns under a new name

By Chris Bennett, Tudor Carsten, Michael R. Coburn, Sarah Dale-Harris, Pablo Guzman, Danielle (Dani) Lemon, Chris Metcalfe and David Spratley

Facebook users in Canada and the US were blocked from using the extremely popular Scrabulous application earlier this week. Facebook blocked the application pursuant to Hasbro's request, as the company has taken the matter to Court with claims that RJ Softwares and the Agarwalla brothers' game infringes on their Scrabble intellectual property rights.

Hasbro owns the rights to the Scrabble game in North America and Mattel owns the rights to it in the rest of the world. Mattel has yet to file a formal lawsuit against the Scrabulous creators. Since the application was blocked earlier this week, the two official games offered on Facebook by Hasbro and Mattel have gone from having fewer than 25,000 users between them to having 60,000 users in Canada and the US alone.

According to CBC, the Agarwalla brothers agreed to have the application blocked in response to Hasbro's lawsuit. They have now come back with a retooled game with a new look and an adjustable board called Wordscraper. The game is available on Facebook and to date, has fewer than 4,000 users.

Coverage here (GameDaily).

Submitted by Tania Da Silva, Articled Student

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Full post as published by Video Game Law Blog on August 01, 2008 (boomark / email).