The toy companies Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada) and Mattel (who own the rights to Scrabble for everywhere else in the world) have asked Facebook to remove the “Scrabulous” application as it infringes on their copyright for the game.
Mathew Ingram has already said this but I’ll say it again: Mattel and Hasbro are making a mistake by giving in to the knee-jerk impulse to think “infringement!” and calling in the legal team. All that will do is generate ill will towards them. A far more profitable approach would be for them to simply buy the application from its creators — which they could easily do for a few hundred thousand dollars, mere pin money to them — and use it as a marketing tool for Scrabble as well as other games in their stable.
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It is a very short-sighted move. I'd have to guess I was probably about 14 the last time I'd played Scrabble (I'm 30, now). Then someone invited me to a Scrabulous game on Facebook.
I now get together with 3 of my friends every 2 weeks for Scrabble night. Between the four of us, we've purchased 2 new Scrabble boards and a hardbound copy of the Official Scrabble Players dictionary since we started Scrabble Night in November.
My friend raised an interesting possibility; that Hasbro is looking for a way to get a relatively easy settlement from Facebook. He also thinks that Facebook will step in to protect the app instead of just dropping it because other Facebook apps could be potentially infringing in the same way.
I disagreed for exactly that reason; once Facebook does something other than a Youtube-esque removal of potentially infringing content they are opening themselves up to a whole bunch of lawsuits. They have no upside to protecting Scrabulous because it won't make that much of a blip in traffic or ad revenue.
We have a $1 bet riding on the outcome. Thoughts on who will win?
Ah, but an even better move is to sue them to reduce the value of their offering, THEN offer to buy them for pennies on the dollar.
Argh. Whatever the outcome...please don't take away my Scrabulous.
Man, why couldn't somebody sue to shutdown FunWall instead. =P