The Hindu : Front Page : Scrabulous pullout disappoints

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Thursday, Jul 31, 2008
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Scrabulous pullout disappoints

Raktima Bose

Kolkata brothers forced to restrict access in the face of legal action

KOLKATA: Scrabulous.com has stopped its fans in the U.S.and Canada from accessing the free add-on Scrabulous application on Facebook till further notice, Jayant Agarwalla, one of the creators of Scrabulous.com, told The Hindu here on Wednesday, amid reports about large numbers of disappointed fans protesting against the withdrawal.

Game-making giant Hasbro had filed a case of infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in U.S. District Court in New York, naming the brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, as the defendants along with their web design and technology company R.J. Software. Hasbro owns Scrabble’s North American and Canadian rights.

“Facebook has informed us about the legal notice from Hasbro Inc. in reference to the Scrabulous application a few days back,” said Mr. Jayant Agarwalla. He said that though R.J. Software was not pleased with the withdrawal, it had done so in deference to Facebook’s concerns. He termed it as “unfortunate,” but declined to comment further.

Scrabulous is a highly popular free application on the social-networking site Facebook. More than 5,00,000 fans have reportedly been playing the online word game daily since June 2007.

Mattel, which owns the Scrabble brand outside the U.S. and Canada, is already pursuing a lawsuit against Scrabulous.com in Indian courts over trademark and copyright violation issues.

Protests galore

New York Times News

Service reports:

The rallying cry, “Boycott Hasbro!”, started early on Tuesday after fans of Scrabulous woke up to find that their game had been abruptly removed from Facebook.com.

To make matters worse, people who tried to download the official Hasbro version of Scrabble found that it did not work either. The authorised game had been the victim of “a malicious attack” on Tuesday morning, its developer said — an attack that came right on the heels of the sudden disappearance of Scrabulous.

Electronic Arts, the video game company that wrote the online Scrabble program for Hasbro, said it was investigating the apparent hacking of its application, and pointed no fingers for the moment. “We’re working with our partners to have Scrabble back online and ready to play as soon as possible,” the company said.

Bloggers denounced Hasbro, howls of protest flooded message boards, and new Facebook groups were created with names like “Down with Hasbro.”

Hasbro, for its part, was keeping a stiff upper lip. It issued a statement on Tuesday inviting fans to try out the “authentic” game of online Scrabble, introduced this month by Electronic Arts.

But on Tuesday, people who downloaded Electronic Arts’ “Scrabble Beta” were greeted with a message that said, “We’ll be back up shortly.” On Tuesday afternoon, Electronic Arts said technical problems had caused the crash; by early evening the company said its game had “experienced a malicious attack this morning, resulting in the disabling of Scrabble on Facebook.”

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