January 17, 2008
Back Off Hasbro!

scrabulous.jpg

One of my most beloved distractions, Scrabulous on Facebook, may soon become "Remember Scrabulous" if the greedy folks Hasbro have their way:

Addicts of Scrabulous, an online word game played by millions of office workers on Facebook, may soon have to go cold turkey because of a looming copyright battle with the owners of Scrabble.

The two entrepreneurs behind Scrabulous, who are making more than $25,000 a month from their widely downloaded application, face a legal challenge from the two toy companies that own the rights to the board game.

Hasbro owns the intellectual property rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada, while JW JW Spear & Sons, a UK-based subsidiary of Mattel, holds them in the rest of the world. Launched in July 2006 by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, brothers in their 20s from Calcutta, Scrabulous has become one of the most popular games played by Facebook members and boasts nearly 600,000 daily active users.

This is so lame.

Scrabulous has most certainly boosted overall interest and likely overall sales in Scrabble itself. How often does a decades old board game become the talk of the town?

Posted by peter to Annoyances at 03:16PM on Jan 17, 2008
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