The End of Conquer Club

[THE KING65]

The popular Facebook game Scrabulous made a comeback of sorts on Thursday, sporting a new name, new look and new set of rules in the hope of avoiding infringement complaints from the owners of Scrabble.

This week, Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of India asked Facebook to block the online application under pressure from Hasbro Inc., which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America. The company had filed a copyright lawsuit, saying the application bore too much resemblance to the venerable board game.
In response, the developers rolled out Wordscraper. The game's board is made up of circles instead of square tiles, and the point system is arranged differently. Wordscraper also allows users to fully customize their own board, determining the shape and point values.

The game's face-lift may not be enough to save the Agarwalla brothers from the pending infringement lawsuit, said Henry Sneath, a Pittsburgh intellectual property attorney who is president of the Voice of the Defense Bar, a group of 22,000 defense lawyers.

"Even though they have tweaked a number of rules for the game, there is still a substantial amount of details that are similar," Sneath said. "I don't think it saves them from further questions."
When asked about the new game, Hasbro said in a statement that it evaluates every situation on a case-by-case basis and will "act appropriately when necessary."

Copyright laws don't protect ideas but the expressions of the ideas, Sneath said, and judges will be looking at whether the developers relied on the original game of Scrabble to create Wordscraper.

"It's still a 15-by-15 board, and you get seven letters with point value," Sneath said. "Here they have changed some of the rules, but the overall premise is pretty much the same."
With the new application heavily promoted on Facebook Thursday, the game quickly garnered several thousand daily users, a far cry from the half a million fans Scrabulous had. Some users said they were confused about the new rules, prompting the developers to promise to improve the look and feel of the game by Friday.

The sanctioned version of the game developed by Electronic Arts Inc. also attracted a few followers, while some users vowed to boycott it.

Scrabulous, one of the first applications allowed on Facebook after the site was opened to outside developers, generated a cult-like following and attracted thousands of players to its Web site, scrabulous.com, which remains active, even though it is named in the lawsuit.

In a copyright and trademark lawsuit filed last week to the U.S. District Court in New York, Hasbro said the name and the promotion of Scrabulous has caused "confusion, mistake and deception" that the Agarwallas were licensed by the company, which owns the rights for the 77-year-old game. Toymaker Mattel, which owns the rights of the game in the rest of the world, has filed a similar lawsuit in India.

"This is an unfortunate event and not something that we are very pleased about, especially as Mattel has been pursuing the matter in Indian courts for the past few months," Jayant Agarwalla said in an e-mail. "We will sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come."




I bolded some key points, since you're obv a little slow.

I guess a quick email to HASBRO will clear this up for all of us.

[THE KING65]

but the overall premise is pretty much the same

^^ btw, this is all that matters to have the site removed or shutdown.^^

Are any of you going to tell me the premise of CC and Risk arent pretty much the same?

[Soloman]

in the end Hasbro will wait to see how there scrabulous suit ends and if it is in there favor they will come for there cut and copyright. There game of risk in all its incarnations has various rules and formats and multiple maps also again nothing truly new here. as far as the slick remarks I love how cowards have balls on the Internet but the same fruits have no cohonas in the real world and so say whatever makes you feel better in your limited forum world, whatever it takes to build some self esteem. but I would love to see some of you people run off at the mouth with people in the real world and if your punk asses do not come out beat down, it would be a miracle...

[hulmey]

but the overall premise is pretty much the same

^^ btw, this is all that matters to have the site removed or shutdown.^^

Are any of you going to tell me the premise of CC and Risk arent pretty much the same?

hOW DOES THE fEUDEL MAP, NEW WORLD AND so...on.. HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH HASBRO??

Although , I have it from a very good source that Hasbro are going to start their very own online Risk site soon

[jbrettlip]

in the end Hasbro will wait to see how there scrabulous suit ends and if it is in there favor they will come for there cut and copyright. There game of risk in all its incarnations has various rules and formats and multiple maps also again nothing truly new here. as far as the slick remarks I love how cowards have balls on the Internet but the same fruits have no cohonas in the real world and so say whatever makes you feel better in your limited forum world, whatever it takes to build some self esteem. but I would love to see some of you people run off at the mouth with people in the real world and if your punk asses do not come out beat down, it would be a miracle...

Cohonas??? Is that a mexican beer??? Learn to spell, or don't use words that are outside your range.

[owenshooter]

in the end Hasbro will wait to see how there scrabulous suit ends and if it is in there favor they will come for there cut and copyright.

doubt it, they launched their own online "SCRABBLE" game today... hasbro doesn't care about scrabulous. they made them change the board and the gameplay which was IDENTICAL (far from the shut down alleged by my astute colleague). CC is not identical in gameplay to risk, and the boards are wholly original, created by members... go down to Target and buy me a Doodle Earth Risk Board or a RISK, Special Edition: Age of Merchants (i see DiM skimming this thread, hoping for some coins from hasbro... ha...). fact is, the rules are different, the maps are different, and hasbro knows this exists.-0

[Qwert]

All maps who start in Map foundry,and if they got some copyright issue,they get warning from MOD and relevand Map Maker,that can not be in production,only if they author get permision from owner,so i realy can see that all new maps have any conection with Hasbro.

[tenio]

CC is not infringing on any copyrights that hasbro has,

CC is not using the name "risk" at all,

the reason scrabulous got into trouble was because of the name,

and also the makers of scrabulous were offered 10 million bucks to hand over everything to hasbro, they refused, then hasbro went into more drastic measures....

CC will stay alive as long as lack wants it to...

[jarrett155]

there are 23,000 members. Lets say 10,000 of them are premium. Premium cost $25/year. That means that lack is making about $25,000/year off CC, that's not including merchandise. Pretty soon he will be able to make a living off running this site alone, if he doesn't already. I don't see any reason why he would stop doing this. If anything I think that he would continue to put more time into it.

you guys forgot manimal

[danodukebb]

why not just f'ing ask lack whether or not this site is at copyright risk huh? clear this s*it up once and for all so you all will stop bitching about it

[jbrettlip]

I would say yes...it is at copyright risk. Or copyright assault intensity level.

Nice 20 page bump by me.

[millej11]

this site was done when I left

[Night Strike]

Was bumping this after 20 years really necessary??

Locked.

(The long copyright post was moved to the Q&A thread.)