Scrabble sucks no matter how you spell it

That's pretty fair I'd say.

That's understandable.

Hell, people don't even call it "Scrabulous". They just call it Scrabble. I'd say that Mattel has a solid case, and probably some solid profits coming their way out of the case.

Me? I'd rather play 'Unspeakable Words'...

Took long enough. I was wondering when Hasbro would get their act together and ask for it to be shut down.

If Apple didn't get to win Look and Feel, neither should Hasbro.

Meh I hate scabble and by hate I mean I suck at it.

That's a shame because it looks quite nice. I used to play this Scrabble ripoff with my roommate in college over the network. Why we didn't just use the actual game is beyond me.

I remember that Scrabble game show. Man, I loved that. Hm.. wonder if theres a good Scrabble game on DS. NY Times Crossword is close enough, though I guess.

Uh. Hasbro or Mattel?

@Deadeyereborn: yeah I can tell by the way you wrote "scabble" :P

Hasbro/Mattel should score a win with this by making a deal where they get a portion of the advertisement revenues. Plus, it's a lot better than the digital offering from EA Games.

You won't see me angrily jumping to the defense of Facebook. They can license the game like Yahoo and everyone else.

Having played Scrabulous (I don't think it was anything to do with Facebook when I played it though) I can easily see why they're doing this. It is a direct copy of Scrabble but with a different name (and the annoying prospect of the other player asking "a/s/l?" when you're trying to play a game).

Does anyone know to what extend you can patent a game design? I'm not just talking hardware (we've seen plenty of motion control lawsuits there), but more about core mechanics of a game.

Obviously, most AAA console titles are too complex to be able to patent the design in any way, but what about casual games, where the core mechanics usually are more apparent to the average gamer.

@Deadeyereborn: Haha! Good one.

Scraddle. There you go, all fixed up Korean-style.

Thank God someone put a stop to that Scrabulous game. I was wondering how long beforeTrobulous,Monopulos,Sorryulus etc.

@StealthBear: This isn't a patent case, but you can patent the functional aspects of pretty much anything. For example:

A board game comprising:
- a plurality of tiled spaces, wherein one or more of the tiled spaces provides a score multiplier; and
- a plurality of character tiles,
wherein the character tiles are placed on the tiled spaces.

Geeze, that was a terrible claim, but you get the idea.

Dammit! That's half the reason I joined!

Aww man, I only just started playing this. Turns out I can be quite locquacious when i put my mind to it.

Bugger.

@Leetables: There is indeed a Scrabble DS. It even suggests "naughty" words.

What about Yahoo's Literati game? It's pretty much exactly like Scrabble and has been there for years

[www.nytimes.com]
Here is the link from the bottom of the article. Seems to be a bit of borked HTML there. No worries.

Curse you, Facebook programmers, for making a digital version of our game before we did!

@ssjmichael: It's probably licensed, then.

@Throtex: And the patent (in the US) would expire in 13 years. How old is Scrabble?

This is a DMCA copyright thing, obviously, as copyrights now outlive everyone. I think it's bullshit, and the world should own Scrabble now, not Hasbro. I mean, seriously, how has Scrabble changed in the last 10 years? It hasn't. Give it up, Hasbro. Endeavors like Scrabulous were actually in the original notion of copyright. See what happens when you elect Sonny Bono?

@Black_Ops_19: Curse you, Facebook programmers, for making a digital version of OUR game before we did!

Intellectual property laws. If they wanted to make a digital version, the Facebook application makers should have struck a deal, rather than outright ripping it off. I love Scrabble. I DETEST plagiarism.

@StealthBear: The courts have historically granted very limited protection to game mechanics. That's one reason why people like Jeff Minter can get away with making games like "Space Giraffe", which is clearly a Tempest knockoff.

Personally, I doubt Hasbro/Mattel would win if they took this to court. But then, these are strange times we live in when it comes to copyright, so who knows how they'd rule at this point. Big business usually wins against the little guy these days.

btw, there are differences between copyrights and patents. You can't copyright game mechanics. That's why the courts take such a dim view of copyright claims in cases like this. You can patent certain things, but patents expire after 15 years. Any patents on Scrabble would have expired long ago.

Completely understandable, gotta protect your investments.

Badasscat is totally right about copyrights and patents, and that's an important distinction (as well as what are called "branded elements", to use some law-speak) in this case. However, To suggest Facebook is the "little guy" in this case is sort of comical (no offense, badasscat). Facebook is not even remotely a little guy, even compared to Mattel/Hasbro. Appears to me like Facebook is finally getting the cease and desist they've deserved on this game for a while. Which is kind of a shame, because who doesn't like free Scrabble?

I'm also surprised this didn't happen sooner, and now I'll never visit facebook again... Only joined because I heard about Scrabble, if that goes, so do I.

Meh....I log into my FaceBook account once every 3 months....I don't see the appeal.

Nooooo! I loved Scrabulous.
My roommate and I sit around and sing, "The Scrabulous, oh, the Scrabulous, Scrabulous.....the Scrabulous."

You know, like "Glamorous?"

The Fergie song?

No?

I think I'll go now.

@SaintWaldo: I already said this wasn't a patent case ... and patents in the United States expire 20 years from the earliest priority date, plus any adjustment (or 17 years from issue, prior to 1995).

@badasscat: There are plenty of copyrightable elements here, though. Color selection for the score multiplier spaces doesn't affect the game mechanics and is in no way functional. You might even be able to argue that the particular scores used for each tile are simply expressive.

The big issue, of course, is the trademark matter, and there would appear to be some serious likelihood of confusion arguments to be made.

facebook itself didn't programme the app. it was a couple of indian guys i believe.

@MrSoursop: The comedy of that is, of course, that people who are hyper-critical of the DMCA without understanding what it means, like "SAINTWALDO", supra, don't realize that if a valid copyright cause of action is asserted, the DMCA might actually serve to protect Facebook. The DMCA is one of the best things to happen to freedom of expression on the Internet, and it's sad it gets such a bad rap.

yeah it was a couple of Indians - Mattel/Hasbro have been rather stupid here in going for facebook.

I hope it gets settled with a simple revenue share or if the creators win against the crappy game companies (as they are these days) - Woo Hoo!

Completely understandable. I play the game a lot (because it's built into facebook it's far more convenient than any other Scrabble-type game). But really, it's no different at all from the board game, and is making its creators (not facebook, a couple guys from india) quite a lot of money (through advertising, etc).

Of course, they'd be smarter to work out a deal where they just get a cut of the profits. And change the name, of course.

@Throtex: As I understand it, it only protects companies who actually comply with takedown notices. While well intentioned, this leads to a lot of companies generating bogus takedown requests, that the recipients are then forced (due to lack of resources to investigate all claims) to take down, or risk litigation in the case of a legitimate claim. While in theory its a good thing...its proven to be just another stick to beat people into submission with...(and that's just regarding the safe harbor provisions...).

I actually really like Scrabulous -- my only problem with it is that the dictionary is crap and there's no way to challenge a word. I was playing a 3-person game with my wife (an English PhD student) and a friend of mine... who proceeded to score bigtime with "XI." Which is not an English word in any respect. But the dictionary allowed it, so we were screwed! My wife decided she didn't like Scrabulous as much after that. :-)

Hasbro should've done a deal with Scrabuluous developers, like the developers asked for. They've built a fabulous implementation and have a big following; it's one of the top Facebook apps. But by going the lawsuit route, the best they can hope for is to get "Scrabulous" to change their name. The game mechanics are unpatented and not copyrightable, all Hasbro owns is the trademarked name. Even a name change is not a slam-dunk; does "Scrabulous" make you think "Hasbro-licensed Scrabble(tm) product, spelled funny for some reason", or "crossword game, probably similar to Scrabble(tm) but not Scrabble(tm)"? If a judge thinks it's the latter, the risk of confusion is minimal, and Scrabulous can keep their name.

@cataput37: XI is good, and not even obscure to anyone who's seen the Greek alphabet. But the two-letter words are so useful, there's a button which brings up the complete list for your convenience. If you want to challenge words, you have to set up a Challenge game, which allows phonys and disallows looking things up in the online dictionary. Regular games only allow legal plays.

These elements are actually an important part of Scrabulous's success, and are distinct from playing Scrabble on a board in your living room, so not even the game mechanics are completely taken from the board game.

when someone does a better job than you, sue them! its the american way!

Letters have been sent to Facebook

Wonder how many points they won.

@diablofreak: Oh god shut up. Read up on the trademark system.

Crecente, they just had a question on Jeopardy the other day regarding the origin of Scrabble, specifically that it was a game created by blending anagrams and crossword puzzles. So no, I don't think there's much likelihood of ancient origins there, considering you need an alphabet (Chinese languages use logographies and syllabaries, not alphabets), and you need fixed word spellings (which English didn't even have at the time of the American Revolution...and still doesn't, when you consider how the Brits still use those anachronistic spellings for words like aluminum and color).

@badasscat:
And yet Wizards of the Coast managed to use a game mechanic to leverage their way into receiving royalties from or outright buying several other CCG companies, even though a letter had surfaced that showed the head of the company had actually _asked_ Steve Jackson (the man, not the company) if he could borrow that specific game mechanic from the old Illuminati box game.

You know...I can see the argument for wanting to protect your license, but I don't see the practicality of it. People are looking for a different experience when they sit down to play Scrabble as opposed to games of Scrabulous drawn out over days, weeks, months. If anything, the emergence of Scrabulous was a reminder to me that I really wanted to pick up a copy of Scrabble.

@catapult37:
"Xi" is a Greek character (sounds like "ksee", when pronounced _properly_, and not in its anglicized form). It's been coopted into use in the English language by both physicists/mathematicians and fraternities/sororities. Greek organizations use it in their signature letters, and it's used in math as a variable, often of a specific type.

Just replace it with "Monopolous" and be done with it.

I think that's pretty dickish of Mattel, myself.

BTW, according to the official website, a _copyright_ application for the game itself was granted on December 1, 1948. The name was granted a _trademark_ on December 16, 1948. Previous iterations of the game (Lexico and Criss-Crosswords) were both turned down for _patent_ applications, so it's unclear if a patent was ever granted. Under US law, the trademark lasts as long as it is in current use with the original holder. The copyright would have lasted 28 years (through the end of 1976), at which point a renewal would have had to be applied for...except in 1976 a piece of legislation went through that changed how copyright works in the US, making it based on the lifespan of the author plus a specified additional number of years, or just a fixed number of years from date of first use for a "work-for-hire". I don't know which of these new clauses applies to Scrabble, though I believe it would be considered a work-for-hire as the creator was not the one who published it. In that case, it should be protected until the end of 2063. Alternately, if it's based on the death of the creator, it should last even longer.

Regardless, they can go after Facebook because Facebook is effectively the publisher, and is much more vulnerable to US-based litigation than a couple of guys in India. Also, they've got clear claims on both copyright and trademark violations, so I'd predict that they either force a removal, or end up being able to negotiate a royalties agreement of their own.