Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Dissy]

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
Mon Aug 25, 4:02 PM ET

NEW YORK - A highly popular Scrabble clone already pulled from Facebook in the United States and Canada continued its tumble over the weekend as the online hangout extended its block of the game throughout most of the world.
 
Facebook said Monday it was forced to disable Scrabulous after one of Scrabble's rights owners, Mattel Inc., made a formal removal request and the developers of Scrabulous took no action themselves.

The Scrabulous application remains available in India, where its developers live and where Mattel has filed a lawsuit claiming violations of intellectual property. Facebook isn't blocking Scrabulous there for now, considering the question of ownership still a matter for Indian courts to resolve.

In deciding to block Scrabulous on Friday, Facebook risked antagonizing a community of software developers it has been trying to nurture and promote. But had it done nothing, it could have faced liability for copyright and trademark infringement.

The company initially skirted that quandary after Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the brothers in Calcutta who created Scrabulous, agreed to withdraw the program in the United States and Canada following a legal threat from Scrabble's North American owner, Hasbro Inc.

Facebook had hoped for a similar resolution when Mattel, owner of Scrabble's rights elsewhere, sent a similar notice, but the Agarwalla brothers refused.

In a statement, Jayant Agarwalla said he found Facebook's action "astonishing" given the site's "claims to be a fair and neutral party."

The bulk of his criticism was directed at Mattel, however.

"It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the (Indian court's) decision," Agarwalla said. "Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary."

Mattel representatives did not respond to e-mail and phone messages Monday.

Both Hasbro and Mattel have been trying to promote an authorized version of Scrabble for Facebook — made by Electronic Arts Inc. in the United States and Canada and by RealNetworks Inc. elsewhere.

The Agarwallas, meanwhile, have released an alternative Scrabble-like word game called Wordscraper, which was not affected by Facebook's latest action. They are hoping that with new rules and circular tiles instead of square ones, Wordscraper can withstand legal challenges.

Bastards, no more Scrabulous...

[jhocking]

They made their money, those guys must've known they were flirting with legal action.

[Edith]

Wordscraper is actually interesting. It requires completely different strategies from Scrabble since there are different numbers of tiles, and the bonus squares are in different places.

I would rather play Scrabble any day, though.

And seriously? Those guys were stupid if they didn't expect to get sued. I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did.

[imapiratearg]

Isn't that how people played Scrabbly?

[Hairy Joe Bob]

Me too, though the fact that I might be losing to a machine instantly makes me think about what would happen if the machines took over and I all of a sudden get images of a desolate earth ruled over by an all-powerful computer just like Skynet in Terminator then all I can think of is Terminator 2 when you see into the future and it's really terrifying and I want to throw the computer out the window because all the machines the machines the machines they are OUT TO GET ME ARGH

[Oli]

Revenge of the sentient boardgames.

[RedLion]

Scrabulous was by far the best app for Facebook, except for maybe the Travellers IQ Challenge thing. I've noticed since it's gone away that I've spent a lot less time on that site overall, though that might not be such a bad thing. Also, WordScraper is a pathetic substitute.

[tania]

do some of you guys remember when two years ago we used to play online scrabble here? you still can!

[negative creep]

Has it been two years already?

[redglasscurls]

I still have the desktop link to that! I stopped bothering going on once I spent less time in gabbly though, because I didn't know when people were on anymore.

[jhocking]

Isn't that how people played Scrabbly?

No, Scrabulous wasn't amenable to creative license. Scrabbly was played with the app eph linked to.

[nobo]

Mattel has put out an app called Scrabble Beta. Its extremely bloated and slow and not very fun.

[jhocking]

Why they didn't just buy out Scrabulous is beyond me.

[squawk]

Yeah, that's what they did for Tetris when they introduced new Tetris and it sucked and people complained so much
because Block Star is awesome

[Blue Kitty]

Mattel has put out an app called Scrabble Beta. Its extremely bloated and slow and not very fun.

I heard a news story that some hackers crashed it in protest of the action taken against Scrabulous

[Oli]

Vive la révolution!

[KvP]

Why they didn't just buy out Scrabulous is beyond me.

I imagine it's a lot like this. A Mattel game can't be simply functional, like Scrabulous is. It has to have polish, and it has to represent the parent company.

[nobo]

Why they didn't just buy out Scrabulous is beyond me.

why pay for something you already own?

[ZJGent]

It is not about the nature of Scrabble, nobo. It's a given thing that Mattel own that, woop-de-do, done and dusted. What he was referring to is, why not take the existing model of the internet game which people are happy with and enjoy and which is generally an acceptedly good thing, and tool it up to be under the mattel logo?

Why go to the trouble of completely starting over with a system people are uncomfortable with? Sure, Mattel know how to make Scrabble. But Digital Scrabble? Online Social Networking Scrabble? They were on shaky ground, and it would have been a wiser move to have merely borrowed some of the innovation that the Scrabulous boys had displayed.

[nobo]

Why go to the trouble of completely starting over with a system people are uncomfortable with?

I assume its because Scrabulous was probably making advertising money off of a product that Mattel has trademarked. Mattel can get 100% of whatever money Scrabulous made by claiming trademark infringement.

[est]

It looks like what Mattel did with their version of the Scrabble Facebook app was to take their PC game version and port it over to the Facebook platform or whatever the fuck is necessary to do that.  As a result instead of the relatively simple, crisp clean interface people are used to be have heavily-branded multicoloured bullshit that runs like a busted mule.  To me it is a much better idea to create a custom Wordscraper board that functions exactly like a Scrabble board and play on that instead.

[jhocking]

why pay for something you already own?

Okay, you miss the point of my statement, even after zjgent clarified. I wasn't talking about the technicalities of who owns what, I was talking about their decision to close down Scrabulous and develop a new Scrabble app. Why not simply acquire and rebrand Scrabulous (whatever business/legal machinations are required to make that happen) rather than go to all the effort to develop a new and untested app?

[nobo]

because acquiring scrabulous means paying the owners of scrabulous. they have legal right to sue scrabulous for copyright infringement and collect whatever ad revenue scrabulous got, or at least stop scrabulous from making money off of mattel's product.

[jhocking]

No, "acquire" doesn't necessarily mean paying them. My vague reference to "legal machinations" was to address the possibility of them seizing the code from the Scrabulous guys. Personally I think this would be a horrendous thing for them to do both from a business and an ethics point of view, but that is irrelevant to my point.

yeesh, I guess you are the answer to my question.

[yelley]

I stopped playing when I realised that people could cheat by using generators and such forth.

I don't like losing in general, I hate the idea that I might be losing to a machine.

that made me so angry... there were a couple of qc people that i would play scrabble with that i was positive were cheating and using generators. not really something i can call someone on, though... it is the internet, after all.

[ZJGent]

dang, that does shake everything I thought at the time. I mean, I'm no ace at scrabble, but I was a little bit surprised at how much better some people were on that thing.

[est]

After a certain point I wouldn't play against a certain RL friend of a friend who would beat all my other friends, because she hit 3 bingos against me in one game and used really fucking ridiculous words.  In that game it was past the point where I could quit the game without losing, so I just played very very slowly and put down the stupidest, weakest words I could to make it obvious I was playing under protest just so that she couldn't force win.

My housemate says that he would play against a certain guy at work whose screen he could see.  He would see him sitting there on some word generator site, but when he'd ask him about it he'd deny it, so he took a picture the next time he saw it and emailed it to him.  Humorous part of this scenario is that the co-worker would still lose most games because even though he'd come up with good words he couldn't work out Scrabble tactics for shit.

[RobbieOC]

Craziest

I played in a Scrabble tournament at a coffee shop near here, and when I play with my friends I'm usually pretty good. But I got smoked. It was actually kind of embarassing...

[RedLion]

I don't think that cheat-o-matic problem was as widespread as you guys are making it out to be. Maybe it's just the people I know, but even when I'm doing regular Scrabble, where you have the board game there in front of you, my friends have a predilection for using absurd but completely "legal" words.

[KvP]

I don't think I've ever gone up against anyone who used a generator. The people I played with are generally all around here and in most cases we've cut it pretty close at the end of the game, which I don't think could have happened were we Scrabble Doping. But the one person I did suspect (not from around here) still had a relatively authentic-looking record (80-45 or somesuch) Do the cheaters throw games to make it less conspicuous or something? A 300-60 record or something would be a red flag, you'd think.

Not that it matters now, of course.

[Johnny C]

because acquiring scrabulous means paying the owners of scrabulous. they have legal right to sue scrabulous for copyright infringement and collect whatever ad revenue scrabulous got, or at least stop scrabulous from making money off of mattel's product.

Alternatively they can go, "Hm, look what these guys did with the source material" and hire them.

This is dumb from a business standpoint for Mattel. Really, really dumb.

[nobo]

Johnny, looks like thats exactly what happened. Looks like Hasbro/Mattel made a more than reasonable offer for scrabulous and they were turned down.

Rumors suggest that in January 2008, Hasbro made an attempt to acquire Scrabulous for an undisclosed sum in the $10 million range.[10] The game had been generating advertising revenue of over $25,000 per month for the Agrawalla brothers.[11] The Agrawallas refused to sell their application to Hasbro, instead requesting a "multiple" of $10 million. It was reported that the Agrawallas had also been looking for other potential suitors who would be willing to pay higher premiums.

source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabulous

According to this New York Times article, Jayant Agarwalla said that he and his brother did not create Scrabulous to make money - they just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers. So why didn't they accept the big check then? The brothers decided to turn down the check, rumored to be around the $10 million mark; apparently, they were holding out for more money. How much more? A multiple of several times $10 million by some accounts. Even though the game, by all fair estimates, was probably only worth around $3-6 million, the brothers felt they deserved more.

source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/29/so-long-scrabulous-hasbro_n_115685.html

[jhocking]

See now why didn't you say that in the first place? Hopefully because you simply didn't know about that before.