I would miss Scrabulous

Hasbro Lawyers Descend on Scrabulous

Two guys from India in hot water over the popularity of Facebook app.
By Mark Whiting, 01/14/2008

Say it ain't so. Fortune magazine's Techland is reporting that toymaker Hasbro is getting ready to sue brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, the two Calcutta-based guys responsible for coding up Facebook's uber-popular (and free) Scrabble knockoff application, Scrabulous.
"But wait!" you say. "If Scrabulous was somehow immoral and/or illegal, wouldn't the toy giant have said something before it became the 9th most popular application on one of the world's most popular social networking websites?" It's not like the brothers Agarwalla are making money off of their programming handiwork after all -- Scrabulous is free to play, even with 2.3 million people using it every single day. Hmm. Perhaps that's the problem.

Scrabulous, beloved by members of the Internet community, rests in a tenuous legal area somewhere between loving homage and copyright infringement. Surprisingly, at the moment, none other than Electronic Arts happens to be the entity currently enjoying exclusive rights from Hasbro to make and distribute electronic copies of Scrabble. This has not stopped dozens of freely available Scrabble applications from circulating around the Internet, of course.

Sadly, the brothers Agarwalla concede that no actual permission was given by Hasbro or EA before they went to work coding up their program, although an (unanswered) letter was sent to Hasbro at the project's commencement. Now the two men admit they may have begun their work "without thinking through the legal aspect at the time." Like many things in life, The Man is here to harsh the buzz.

"We're trying to work out some kind of deal," comments Jayant. "[Hasbro] sent a notice to Facebook two weeks ago. The lawyers are working on it."

Hey Hasbro and EA, here's an idea: instead of coming down hard on a well-known application that everybody already loves (and earning yourself boos from tons of gamers in the process), how about officially licensing the technology from a pair of hardworking coders who aren't actually making big money anyway off your IP? With some ads, it'd probably net you way more money than all those copies of portable cellphone Scrabble that you might not be selling anyway.

Just sayin'.