The Hindu : Sport : Kolkata brothers on top of the game

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Wednesday, Oct 01, 2008
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Kolkata brothers on top of the game

Raktima Bose

KOLKATA: The Delhi High Court has held that U.S. toy-maker Mattel has no copyright over the online word game ‘Scrabulous,’ and declined to issue a restraining order against its creators, the Agarwalla brothers of Kolkata, and their web design company RJ Software.

“The court, however, has held that we cannot use the name ‘Scrabulous’ as it is quite similar to ‘Scrabble’. We are not sure whether to appeal against the decision and will take a decision after consulting our legal advisers,” said Jayant Agarwalla, the younger of the siblings. “We launched a new word-game site named Lexulous.com three days after closing down Scrabulous.com, following the court order,” he said.

He said that notwithstanding the restraint, they were very happy with the court’s decision.

Scrabulous.com ran into trouble in February 2008 when Mattel, the owners of Scrabble’s intellectual property rights outside Canada and the U.S., filed a suit against RJ Software before the Delhi High Court to restrain it from using the name ‘Scrabulous’ and to remove the game from the server.

Scrabulous was a highly popular free add-on application on the social networking site Facebook. More than 5,00,000 fans were reportedly playing it online daily since late-June 2007. It was taken off on August 22 after Mattel’s move.

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