Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous
Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble.
The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users.
Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.
This seems rather poopy of Hasbro and Mattel. I’d bet that out of those half a million daily users on Facebook, most of them already have the board game, or have since bought one as a result of Scrabulous.
I sure hope this won’t affect email Scrabulous! 😕
casa azahar 
Yes it is totally crappy.
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The greedy buggers! They’d better not mess with the email version, but I have a bad feeling about it. I’m sure Scrabulous hasn’t got a leg to stand on legally… 😦
Still, maybe they can change the name, move some of the double/triple word scores around, etc. and say that it’s no longer infringing copyright.
Let’s hope so anyway.
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Why don’t the makers of Scrabulous and the owners of Facebook, who do have the cash, work out a royalties deal with Hasbro? Saves face for everyone.
But if you want to get in a quick one before they yank it, let me know…
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Done, ian! 🙂
Dan, what will we do? I guess we could still play email scrabble by sending each other photos of the updated board…
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Remember the days when people would play chess games by mail? I knew of people who mailed post cards back and forth, identifying a single move, each keeping identical boards at home. I guess i don’t have that kind of patience…
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Yeah, I remember that, daisy. But chess moves can be described and understood more easily than scrabble moves. By email it would be a snap, but the photos could be a drag.
It occured to me, ian, that Hasbro/Mattel is probably just pissed off that they didn’t think of online scrabble first. I think they should hire the two brothers at a very decent salary to keep Scrabulous up-to-date and running well.
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Actually there’s a reasonably standard notation for describing scrabble moves in text, the problem is that we wouldn’t have a shared bag of letters. I think there might be other online scrabble games though, but not as easy as scrabulous and you might have to pay…
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Dang, didn’t even think about the letters – duh, what a maroon!
Here’s an update: Fans fight for Scrabulous future
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Uh oh. Email Scrabulous has been down for the past couple of days with this notice:
“Temporarily down for changing the website layout.”
Facebook Scrabulous is still working though.
I can’t find you on Facebook, ian!
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