Two Calcutta guys pilfered the long established Scrabble property — Hasbro sued, Facebook thought it was okay. So, what’s going on ???
Last Christmas I bought my wife the Premier Wood Luxury Edition of Scrabble (as seen on the Opra show) because she’s a real scrabble nut. Then, when FaceBook started offering Scrabulous I was bombarded by invitations to ‘play’ online… it became a fad! But then Hasbro had their own ideas about online play.
The game Scrabble is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions. One hundred million sets have been sold worldwide, and sets are found in one out of every three American homes.
What were they thinking? Here’s another clear case that the internet is void of accountability. Two crooks from Calcutta ripped the property of a long established U.S. company, and no one online (including big players like FaceBook) seems to see anything wrong. The media as you would guess is being very politically correct and gentle on the two Calcuta criminals attempting rip Hasbro off.
Hasbro wants Scrabulous taken offline.
The online version is really NOT scrabble in the traditional sense, and the crooks modified the name just enough to evade U.S. Trademark laws. However, they could not evade the patent laws because the game “plays” just like the original Scrabble.
Scrabulous the rip-off, is a sorry copy however — it gives all kinds of cheats, and allows words that are not words. If you play against the computer, it’s no fun at all since the computer immediately bangs back its play so fast it leaves the player just sitting doing word puzzles. I believe the computer cheats anyway. (After all, the computer doles out the chips too!)
Tom Magrino, correspondent for GameSpot, News.com posted this on ZDNet News:
It was only a matter of time before the Scrabble-Scrabulous feud came to a head, and that breaking point has now been reached. Hasbro said today that it has filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla, and RJ Softwares, better known as the creators of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. As part of the suit, Hasbro said that it has served Facebook with yet another take-down notice for the application due to copyright infringement.
Facebook said it was disappointed with Hasbro’s move — and we can understand why. Big time players online like FaceBook, Myspace.com, eBay.com, Google.com, all feel they are above any incrimination for any criminal activities — they’re so big, they’re above the law.
Hasbro, is playing fare though, and last week, an official version of Scrabble was released for Facebook users in Canada and the US.
