Hasbro Inc. Suing Online Scrabble Knock-Off
Hasbro Inc. - the American toy company - is suing the creators of Scrabulous. Scarbulous is a Scrabble game knock-off and according to Hasbro it has infringed on the rights that Scrabble holds. They filed a suit this week asking for assests of bankrupt Coleco. They also asked Facebook to block the game from their site.
Although Scrabulous has been around since 2006, Hasbro is apparently angry that, even after releasing an official Scrabble together with game maker Electronic Arts Inc., Facebook users still preferred the knock-off, even though both were free.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the brothers in Calcutta, India, who designed Scrabulous, as well as their company, RJ Softwares, says that both the name and the game itself are very similar to Scrabble. It appears that the two Indian programmers themselves acknowledged that their Scrabulous is not really different from Scrabble, a statement which Hasbro lawyers said amounts to an acknowledgement that they copied the decades-old board game.