Hasbro sues Scrabulous creators – Facebook app faces deletion
Scrabulous, one of the most popular, fun, and user-friendly applications on the Facebook social network, could soon face deletion. Hasbro, the intellectual property owners of the Scrabble board game that Scrabulous so successfully apes, is suing the game’s creators, and has asked Facebook to remove the game from its site.
Scrabulous is a fantastic approximation of the hugely popular Scrabble board game, which is played by thousands of players around the world on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it is also a completely unofficial version of the game, and Hasbro, the games company that owns the rights to the official game, obviously isn’t too happy with having its property used in this way.
This whole issue has actually been a long time coming, with Hasbro sending cease and desist letters to Facebook asking the application be removed as long ago as January. The deadline for removal came and went, and nothing much happened.
Then at the beginning of July, Hasbro launched its own, long-awaited version of Scrabble online to a scattering of sites, one of which was Facebook. At that point, it was obvious that some kind of legal action would then be taken, especially given the fact that the official Scrabble game was failing to gain anywhere near the amount of users Scrabulous has.
According to CNET, Hasbro has now filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Scrabulous. It has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, claiming that it infringes the company’s intellectual property.
The application is still up on Facebook, and the company’s representative Brandee Barker issued a statement claiming disappointment over being dragged in to the legal dispute. He states that Facebook has however “forwarded their [Hasbro's] concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response.
RJ Softwares, the India-based company of which the Agarwala brothers are in charge of, hasn’t yet responded. They could potentially just ignore the lawsuit, as with no US assets to seize, there is little Hasbro could then do about it, unless of course the Indian authorities choose to act.
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