As had long been speculated, Hasbro Inc., which sells the Scrabble board game, has sued the creators of Scrabulous, the online word game remarkably similar to Scrabble. The American toy company claims the online game Scrabulous copies its game Scrabble, and asks the court to remove the Scrabulous application from Facebook.
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On Thursday, the game-making giant Hasbro filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York names as defendants Kolkata, India-based RJ Softwares, its CEO Rajat Agarwalla, and Jayant Agarwalla, who designed Scrabulous and launched it two years ago.
In its lawsuit, Hasbro that owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada claims the Agarwalla brothers have violated Hasbro's intellectual property rights by creating the online game Scrabulous. It asks the court to shut down the Scrabulous game from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com Website, and grant Hasbro damages and attorneys fees.
"Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties," Barry Nagler, Hasbro's general counsel, said 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."
Hasbro said Thursday that it has sent a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to the social networking site Facebook, urging it to abruptly remove the popular Scrabulous application, which has attracted some half-million daily users, from its Web site.
"We expect the full cooperation of Facebook in this matter," Hasbro said in a statement.
In response to Hasbro’s notice, Facebook said, “"Facebook has tried to use its status as neutral platform provider to help the parties come to an amicable agreement. We're disappointed that Hasbro has sought to draw us into their dispute; nevertheless, we have forwarded their concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response."
"Our hope and expectation is that the parties can resolve their disagreements in a manner that satisfies the parties, that continues to offer a great experience to gamers and that doesn't discourage other developers from using our platform to share creativity and test new ideas," ," the California-based Facebook added.
This year in January, Hasbro, which owns the North-American rights of Scrabble, and Mattel, which owns the Scrabble brand outside the U.S. and Canada, urged Facebook to remove the renegade online version of its game from the website.
Designed by architect Alfred Mosher Butts in the 1930s, Scrabble is a board game of interlocking word building. In this game two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The created words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary.
The game is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions, and an estimated one hundred million Scrabble sets have been sold worldwide.
Launched in July, 2006, Scrabulous is an amazing game and is played much the same way as Scrabble. The game is enjoyed by millions of users from all over the world. It is among the top 10 most downloaded applications on Facebook, which has more than 90 million active users.
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