Legal Troubles Mount for Scrabulous: Hasbro Sues for Infringement

American toy company Hasbro Inc has sued Thursday, July 24, the creators of a Scrabble knock-off called Scrabulous. The online game apparently infringed on the Scrabble North-American rights which Hasbro now owns after acquiring the assets of bankrupt Coleco. Also, Hasbro asked Facebook to block the Scrabulous online game, which has attracted some half-million daily users. Although Scrabulous is around since 2006, Hasbro is apparently angry that, even after releasing an official Scrabble together with game maker Electronic Arts Inc., Facebook users still preferred the knock-off, even though both were free. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the brothers in Calcutta, India, who designed Scrabulous, as well as their company, RJ Softwares, says that both the name and the game itself are very similar to Scrabble. It appears that the two Indian programmers themselves acknowledged that their Scrabulous is not really different from Scrabble, a statement which Hasbro lawyers said amounts to an acknowledgement that they copied the decades-old board game. Hasbro is seeking damages, legal costs, and the elimination of the online game from Facebook. Scrabble was designed by architect Alfred Mosher Butts in the 1930s. The game was met with skepticism by manufacturers, and it only became known because Jack Strauss, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation in 1952. There are professional competitions of Scrabble, which can be played by two to four players on a square board with a 15-by-15 grid of cells. In the United States there is the National Scrabble Championship, held this year in Orlando, Florida. The World Scrabble Championship is held in odd years, and the last one was in Mumbai, India last year. Currently, Scrabble North-American rights belong to Hasbro, while in the rest of the world Mattel owns the copyright to the popular game. Mattel acquired the rights when it bought J. W. Spear & Sons in 1994, winning a bidding war with Hasbro. It is estimated that around 100 million Scrabble sets have been sold worldwide. There is a computer game which plays Scrabble as well. In the United States, the official Scrabble game was created by Funkitron, released by Atari and uses the Maven engine created by Brian Sheppard. Outside of North America, the official Scrabble computer game is released by another game studio, Ubisoft. By Ms.Bobby Aanand, Metropolitan Jury

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