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This story I find amazingly ironic since my job is to solely work with words and letters, manipulate them, move them around, and create new ones to differentiate them from other existing brands. If any of you are familiar with and addicted to the Facebook application Scrabulous, then your life has probably changed recently. Here in the US and Canada, the application has been shut down due to toy giant Hasbro (who owns the US rights to Scrabble) handing down a copyright infringement lawsuit to the makers of Scrabulous. The India-based creators of Scrabulous are said to have never gotten permission to create the so called “knock-off” from Hasbro, nor Mattel, who owns the international rights to Scrabble. Although the game Scrabble is also an application provided on the site, it has recently been hit with an attack shutting its players out as well. With both games being blocked, the devoted Scrabulous players are making their widely disappointed opinions about Hasbro known all throughout the Facebook community.
So what does this mean for Hasbro? What will the judge decide, and more importantly, what will happen to all of the time spent playing Scrabulous on Facebook? I know…let’s get the traditional, hard-board game of Scrabble out and create a new name for Scrabulous!
By: Kelly Wilson