Inside Social Games

In a move that many have been expecting for a long time, Hasbro, owners of the popular Scrabble game for the past 60 years, has filed a lawsuit against the developers of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. Scrabulous, which sports over 500,000 daily active users, is one of the most popular applications on Facebook, and was an early favorite amongst many employees at Facebook itself. Now, it’s the subject of a suit in US District Court.

According to Brad Stone at the New York Times,

“Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, in a statement. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.”

“Hasbro has always had the same two priorities,” said Mark Blecher, general manager for Hasbro Digital Media, in an interview this morning. “One is to offer a great playing authentic game for fans and the second is to protect our intellectual property. This was theft of I.P., plain and simple.”

Apparently, Hasbro and Scrabble licensee EA briefly spoke with the Agarwalla Brothers about working together, but then decided to file a motion to shut Scrabulous instead. EA recently launched an officially sanctioned version of Scrabble on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.