Hasbro May Win Court Battle, But it Will Lose the War

Game maker Hasbro is suing the makers of Scrabble clone, Scrabulous. The litigation was filed against Calcutta-based brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla in a New York Southern District court yesterday, and comes just as Hasbro has released an official version of Scrabble for Facebook. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada while Mattel owns the rights for the rest of the world. In addition to suing the Agarwallas, Hasbro has asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous from the social network, a request that Facebook has so far refused preferring to remain a neutral party hoping the two parties can reach a settlement.

There is a big appetite for Scrabble on Facebook with Scrabulous bringing in 506,580 users compared to the Hasbro version of Scrabble with 10, 529 and Mattel's with 9658.

Losing the War

Although I am a big fan of Scrabulous personally, at first glance Hasbro's request seems a reasonable one. Even the Argawallas admit that Scrabulous is a Scrabble rip off that the brothers created so they could play their favorite game online. So why not remove it? This is a clear violation of intellectual property rights. Well, that was before I discovered that Mattel and Hasbro have done what companies trying to protect their property do best: prove absolutely incompetent at giving customers what they want.

Right now, both Mattel have Scrabble games online which means that property rights have been divided along traditional lines. The Hasbro game is available only to North Americans while the Mattel game is for the rest of the world. While that kind of division may not have been a problem twenty years ago, today Facebook users, myself included, can have friends all over the world. So if I want to play a game with a friend in England, it's not going to happen.

Facebook users are up in arms over the impending loss of Scrabulous as well and over 50000 people have joined Save Scrabulous groups on Facebook.

There is a lesson here. Both Mattel and Hasbro would be better served by combining their efforts to create a worldwide game that disregards international borders. Until these guys wise up, long live Scrabulous!

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