The latest turn in this saga doesn’t look so good for Scrabulous… Hasbro, the maker of Scrabble, is suing the creators of Scrabulous, the uber-popular Facebook app. In a statement, the company says the suit was filed against Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla in the Southern District of New York, and it adds that it has filed a DMCA takedown notice with Facebook, demanding that the app be removed now. We’ll monitor how fast or whether Facebook complies, but hopefully you don’t have too many unfinished games. Just a guess: Faced with a DMCA takedown notice from a company that has a solid complaint, Facebook will cave (right now it’s still up). Back in January, Hasbro and Mattel first demanded that Facebook deal with the app. It’s clear what’s going on timing-wise: An official version of Scrabble was just launched on Facebook with the help of Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS), and obviously that’s the version Hasbro wants folks playing. Perhaps we need some sort of non-profit “Scrabble-portability” organization to ensure that users can move their in-process games from one to the other. Release.
Update: The full lawsuit is embedded below (RSS readers may have to click through)..read pages 9-11 for the most relevant part…after the jump.
Scribd sucks. You can't read it. Please link to a PDF!
Facebook will lose if they comply – many many Scrabulous fans spend hours each day in the application and have no use for the rest of Facebook – so Facebook user stats will decline.
"Faced with a DMCA takedown notice from a company that has a solid complaint, Facebook will cave". That may be, but users will revolt..the community of Scrabulous users is too large, and this lawsuit is too late in the game for this kind of radical action.