OMG. It's happening. Hasbro and Mattel, who split ownership of the Scrabble trademark, have asked the Indian developers of Scrabulous (or the Faboo Scraboo as I call it) to remove Scrabulous from Facebook!
According to the BBC article, they claim that Scrabulous is infringing their copyrights. Now, I have no idea why the BBC links Hasbro's and Mattel's Scrabble trademark ownership to copyrights, but I assume BBC means that Hasbro and Mattel (H&M) split ownership of certain copyrighted materials in Scrabble. I don't think there's really any question that the identical Scrabble board, game rules, tile values, and tile counts (and more) are copyrights.
One problem is if H&M think they can make their own online Scrabble game, they might want to choke off competition to open the field for their game. Another problem is the amount of control H&M could exert on licensees might be hard to negotiate. They might insist on name changes, design changes, advertising changes, etc. I hope that H&M is willing to give these guys a license. In any case, SOS ~ Save our Scrabulous!
Edit: Here's an interesting blog on this story from the BBC with an insightful quote: "my point is that, as Google has already found, the early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing."
Edit: Here's a link from Yahoo to a video from ABC news. Basically the same stuff, but it does reveal that Hasbro sold a license to Electronic Arts a few months ago for electronic versions of its games. I'm guessing that means Scrabulous is going the way of the dodo. /cry
