'Scrabulous' Fans Turn to 'Wordscraper'
Hasbro To Evaluate Possible Infringement
August 5, 2008
The latest drama in the ongoing battle between Hasbro and the makers of the popular Scrabble clone Scrabulous on Facebook has been a meteoric rise in the popularity of Wordscraper, a Scrabble-like game created by the same Indian brothers who created Scrabulous. Last week, Hasbro’s lawsuit against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla resulted in the game being disabled for U.S. and Canadian players.
Wordscraper plays much like Scrabulous, but with a customizable board (which can be configured to look the same as a standard Scrabble board) that uses circles instead of squares and has additional bonus tiles. Hasbro’s official response was that it “will evaluate every situation individually and take actions as appropriate.”
If Hasbro is to be successful on a follow-up suit (if one is filed), it will need to establish that Wordscraper is, essentially, a copy of Scrabble, as opposed to a generic word game that only bears a passing resemblance to Scrabble. The New York Times reports that Wordscraper had 80,000 users as of Sunday night, compared to 91,000 for Hasbro’s official Facebook version of Scrabble.
