 Ready, set, spell! But first, recall back in January of this year when I wrote about Hasbro, the popular game manufacturer that was looking to shut down the much-admired Facebook application, Scrabulous. Hasbro claimed the interactive crossword game was a clear infringement on its trademarked board game, Scrabble. Okay, so maybe the two were very similar. Still, in my opinion, that was no reason to sue the makers of Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta, India. Come on, Hasbro. You’re a multi-billion dollar company. I’m sure you weren’t losing big on the Scrabulous front. In any case, the big dog won, despite much protest from Facebook fans across the country, and after a short period of being shut down, Scrabulous revamped and reemerged earlier this month as Wordscraper (which I still contend is a term for a medieval torture device for English majors). For a while after the launch, as far as I could tell, Scrabulous was still available online to lexicon-lovers outside North America, where Hasbro owns copyrights. But on Tuesday, Barry Levine reported with Newsfactor.com that Scrabulous is now “banned from Facebook” almost completely. That’s right, the social networking company announced Monday that Mattel, which has copyright ownership outside the U.S. and Canada, protested against the application. As a result, Facebook made the executive decision to remove Scrabulous worldwide. Well, except for in India, as Levine reports: “A lawsuit by Mattel is pending in India, and Facebook's approach there is that this is a matter for Indian courts to handle.” Co-developer Jayant Agarwalla communicated via email to news media, stating, “Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary. It is even more astonishing that Facebook, which claims to be a fair and neutral party, took this step.” Thus marks a sad day for Facebookers around the world (again, except for India). Over the last few months, Scrabulous not only became one of the most popular Facebook applications, it became a brain teaser way of life. There has been an overflow of negative feedback on Electronic Game’s and Hasbro’s joint-venture- Scrabble for Facebook. Looks like city hall (a.k.a.: corporate game companies) won out on this time. So much for the underdog- but in the mean time, you can check out Wordscraper and hopefully relive some of that Scrabulous goodness many will come to miss. |
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