Hasbro drops Scrabulous lawsuit against Agarwallas
19 Dec 2008
Hasbro has settled a lawsuit filed against two Indian brothers, whose RJ Software had created the word game `Scrabulous' on the Facebook, a game similar to Hasbro's own Scrabble.
Kolkata-based Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla created the game as they couldn't find an online version of `Scrabble' that they liked.
Scrabulous, however, was removed from Facebook and replaced with a Hasbro-sanctioned version of online Scrabble after Hasbro filed the suit this summer.
Scrabulous was , in fact, not as popular as has been reported to be and there were too many bugs in its new version `Wordscrapper'. Many people had eventually stopped playing `Scrabulous' or 'Wordscrapper.'
Critics also point out that 'Scrabulous' was too small a challenge for Hasbro, which owns the North-American rights to the popular word-choice game 'Scrabble'.
The Agarwallas had agreed not to use the term `Scrabulous' after the lawsuit was filed and replaced it with 'Wordscraper,' which never gained popularity. Scrabulous had around 48,000 members hooked to the game on Facebook.
A press release from RJ Software said that the company had agreed not to use the term ''Scrabulous'' and to make changes to the Lexulous and Wordscraper games (also designed by the Agarwalla brothers) in the US and Canada to distinguish them from the Scrabble.
The Agarwalla brothers are still not out of the woods as there is still a lawsuit filed by Mattel Inc against them pending in the Delhi high court over trademark and copyright violations. Mattel owns the rights to the Scrabble outside the US and Canada.