Word Scrap Continues

Following on from Sarah's post earlier this year, the Scrabulous application has now been removed from Facebook but only for US and Canadian users of the site.  The removal of the application comes after Hasbro, the owner of the rights to "Scrabble" in the US and Canada, commenced legal action for copyright and trade mark infringement.  However, Scrabulous is currently still available to UK users of Facebook although perhaps not for much longer as Mattel, the owner of rights to "Scrabble" in the UK, has launched legal action against the developers of Scrabulous.

In response, those behind Scrabulous have released a new version of the game called "Wordscrapper" although it remains to be seen whether this will put an end to the disputes surrounding the game.  Scrabulous has been hugely popular with Facebook users and fans have embraced "Wordscrapper" whilst shunning online versions of the Scrabble game by Mattel and Hasbro and even calling for boycotts of Hasbro products.  This is sure to annoy Mattel and Hasbro and it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Comments

[CyperPanda]

Having had a quick look around Wordscrap, it does not like they have made many design changes. There are limited changes as round tokens, change of score of tokens and introduction of the quadruple score but it remains to be seen whether these changes are enough to exonerate them from liability. You might find the posts entitled 'The overnight metamorphosis of Scrabulous' and 'Absolutely Fabulous Scrabulous? Or Absolutely Fabulous Infringing Game?' at http://cyberpanda-cyberpanda.blogspot.com/ interesting.