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Hasbro Sues Scrabulous For Being Too Scrabble-ish
Date : 11 Jan 2008 Category : Business
Techdirt
It was only a matter of time before super-popular office productivity killer, Scrabulous, was sued by Hasbro for infringing upon the Scrabble trademark. A shutdown notice was sent two weeks ago, although, as of right now, Scrabulous is still operational (hurry up and finish up your games). Founded in 2006 as a standalone website by two Indian brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, Scrabulous' growth accelerated significantly when it launched as an application for Facebook. As the 9th most popular application on Facebook, Scrabulous boasts over 2.3 million active users with over 500,000 of them active daily. While Hasbro does indeed have a strong legal case against the Agarwalla brothers, they are missing out on a key opportunity by pursuing this litigious route. Although Hasbro recently licensed the digital rights of its games to EA, no online version of Scrabble exists right now. So, by shutting down Scrabulous, Hasbro would be angering 2.3 million of Scrabble's biggest fans. Instead, why not hammer out a compromise and turn this into a win-win-win situation? Unfortunately, most likely, history will repeat itself, as this is not the first time Hasbro has chosen this route -- in 2005, they shut down popular online Scrabble site, e-scrabble.
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