There’s another twist in the already long and winding road that has seen the massively popular Scrabble imitator (it’s lines like those that really help their legal case), Scrabulous, going up against the real thing. Forget Scrabulous – meet Wordscraper.

I’ve been following this story right from the off, when at the beginning of the year, Hasbro sent cease and desist letters to Facebook asking that the Scrabulous app be removed from the site. This was due to claims of copyright and intellectual property infringements.

Nothing much happened for months, and then all of a sudden we had a flush of activity. On July 8th, an official Scrabble application arrived on Facebook, and promptly received a withering glance from devoted Scrabulous fans. After the officially sanctioned online version of the game failed to win any kind of support from players, Hasbro launched a lawsuit against Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Scrabulous. Facebook finally lost its favourite son on July 29th.

But now, according to Mashable, it’s back… kind of. It’s obvious that the brothers behind Scrabulous knew their time was soon up, as within days of the app disappearing from Facebook, they have launched a replacement called Wordscraper. And this is no overnight build – it’s clearly been in the making for some time.

The name has obviously changed, and so has the board, now sporting circles instead of squares, and a very open plan setting. The scoring system has also been tweaked, and you can now place the high-scoring tiles wherever you see fit before a game. But will this be enough to keep Hasbro’s lawyers away?

I personally think it will be, as there are now many imitations of trademarked games on Facebook, and beyond, which look and feel much more like the real thing than Wordscraper does. If Hasbro continue the legal fight then surely the creators of all these other apps should also be in the firing line.

The fight is now on for which of the two apps is going to prove more popular: official Scrabble or Wordscraper. The problem Hasbro faces is that the unyielding push to have Scrabulous removed from Facebook has upset many people, and they aren’t soon going to forget. I’m going to be playing Wordscraper from now, and I hope you do the same.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 10:10 pm under Internet, Legal, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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