The dispute between Hasbro and the makers of Scrabulous has
gone legal. Hasbro has filed a lawsuit against the creators of the Facebook’s
application Scrabulous - Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla and their company RJ
Softwares.
The dispute has begun this year in January when Mattel and
Hasbro, the joint owners of Scrabble trademark, demanded the removal of
Scrabulous from Facebook due to copyright infringement.
Currently, Scrabble North-American rights belong to Hasbro,
while in the rest of the world Mattel owns the copyright to the popular game. It
is estimated that around 100 million Scrabble sets have been sold worldwide.
Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla have created Scrabulous in lat
2005 and the games was made available at Scrabulous.com in 2006. However, its
real success came in 2007 after it was added as an application on Facebook.
Hasbro Inc., maker of board game Scrabble, said Thursday
that it has sent a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to Facebook,
requiring the popular site to take away the Scrabulous application from its website.
Claiming that the software violated the company’s
copyrights, general counsel Barry Nagler said on behalf of Hasbro that
Scrabulous represents a blatant infringement.
"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," he said.
A Facebook official statement asserted the company was
dismayed to be involved in the clash and refused to remove the game, saying
that over the last year it has attempted multiple times to make the two parts
come to an understanding.
“Over the past year, Facebook has tried to use its status as
neutral platform provider to help the parties come to an amicable agreement,” the
statement reads. “We're disappointed that Hasbro has sought to draw us into
their dispute.”
Facebook said that it forwarded the takedown notice to
Scrabulous and "requested their appropriate response."
After Facebook was asked to remove Scrabulous due to
copyright infringement, over 54,000 fans created “Save Scrabulous” online
movement with the purpose of convincing Scrabble owners to allow Scrabulous to
continue on Facebook claiming that if it hadn’t been for the online game, they
wouldn’t have bought the original Scrabble game either.
In early July, Hasbro and Electronic Arts created their own
official version of the Scrabble commercial board game for Facebook. However,
it seems that its popularity is far smaller than Scrabulous’ one. Hasbro and
EA’s version on Facebook currently enjoys less than 9000 daily active users
worldwide compared to Scrabulous, which draws more than 500,000 users every
day.
EA is not at its first collaboration with Hasbro, but
Scrabble is the first game to reach beyond the iPod, onto a social networking
site. The iPod already benefits from applications brought by EA and licensed by
Hasbro, such as Scrabble, Monopoly or Yahtzee.
