Hasbro Launches Lawsuit Against Scrabulous Developers

This story has been dragging on for a while now, but Hasbro has finally launched a lawsuit against brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla the makers of Scrabulous. “Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Hasbro’s general counsel Barry Nagler, 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.” Interestingly the suit comes only after the launch of a beta version of an official Scrabble game which leads to the question did Hasbro try to do a deal with the Agarwalla brothers or did they wait until their own online version of the game was complete before taking real action? Either way Hasbro's version has a lot of catching up to do with nearly 9,000 active Facebook players Thursday while Scrabulous had over 500,000. More from the LA Times here, and the New York Times here.

Facebook Asked to Remove Scrabulous

From the "I can't believe it's taken them this long" department comes the news that Hasbro and Mattel have reportedly asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous, an obvious rip-off of the popular boardgame, from its application directory. Scrabulous has a large following and, in true Facebook fashion, "Save Scrabulous"Facebook groups have been established in a effort to save the game. The largest having more than 30,000 members! According to Cnet, both sides of the debate are being tight lipped, so you can be sure that the lawyers are being kept busy. Why don't Hasbro / Mattel just buy out the company and take the half million users? I suppose that might set an ugly precedent...