Indian court hands Scrabulous mixed verdict

The creators of Scrabulous sent their fans a spot of good news this morning.

Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the Indian brothers who came up with the Scrabble-style word game for Facebook, told fans that the Dehli courts ruled that their game did not violate Mattel's copyrights. It did, however, consider the name "Scrabulous" a trademark violation of Scrabble and ordered the Agarwallas to stop using the word, the brothers said.

"We will take a call on whether we will appeal against the decision on the Trademark after consulting our legal advisors," the Agarwallas wrote in an e-mail to fans. Bottom line: The Indian court believes that the Scrabulous game is legally in the clear; it's just that it can't be called that.   

Mattel, based in El Segundo, did not immediately return calls requesting information and comment.

Mattel, which owns the international rights to Scrabble, sued the Agarwallas in Indian court in February. Hasbro, the owner of Scrabble in North America, followed suit in July. Several days later, the Agarwallas pulled the application from Facebook and put up a new game called Wordscraper, a similar game that lets players modify their own board.

The Agarwallas today said that fans had taken to the new version, playing 1 million Wordscraper games in the last month.

-- Alex Pham

Comments

check the Scrabulous website--it's not operating. is this the effet of this court decision?

[David H.]

Check out -- http://www.lexulous.com/ -- it's where Scrabulous, renamed, will be once they get it up & running. For now you can play solitaire on the site.

You can also play WordScraper on Facebook, which is very similar to Scrabulous & created by the same guys.

[John]

As of a few hours ago the scrabulous site was "parked" by the company hosting the domain (godaddy.com). It's unlikely that godaddy would park the site for any reason other than 1) a court order or 2) at the request of teh domain owners. Parking it for bandwidth abuse or some other term of the service contract would be too much of a coincidence. Sad day for scrabble players.

[Diane]

I was disappointed when I went to play scrabulous and found the site was gone. I tried to play WordScraper, but it's not for me. Thanks David H. for the info on lexulous.