Toy giants crack down on Scrabulous, one of Facebook’s most popular applications
Lawyers for Hasbro and Mattel have asked Facebook to pull the game, saying that Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game. The game was built for the site by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two software developers based in Kolkata, and has 594,924 daily active users - about a quarter of the total that have so far signed up to play it. Interestingly, the brothers say they hit upon the idea of launching a free online Scrabble game when a site where they used to play decided to charge its users in 2004 (how very Web 1.0).
“Next year, we decided to launch our own free scrabble site. It was to help the gaming community,” says Jayant. Rajat and Jayant claim that they contacted Hasbro about collaborating on the game but received no response. It it worth noting that it has taken the toy giants rather a long time to react to the game, despite its high profile and obvious similarity (it’s exactly the same) to Scrabble.
Brands dream of getting this kind of traction online — and Scrabulous has arguably caused a generation to fall in love with Scrabble all over again. If Hasbro and Mattel succeed in having the game removed — rather than entering into talks with the developers — they will have scored a spectacular own goal. A Save Scrabulous group is already ablaze with Facebookers commenting on their shortsightedness - it currently has 6,000 members and counting. Of course Mattel and Hasbro are going to create their own version. But why not just piggy-back on what’s already there, and reap the benefits? Hasbro and Mattel have an opportunity here to engage properly with social media and look like good guys. Let’s hope they don’t blow it.
Source: BBC.
UPDATE: following widespread reporting in the press, the Save Scrabulous group had ballooned overnight to 28,000+ ….
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