Hasbro withdraws lawsuit against makers of Scrabulous

Toy company Hasbro has withdrawn its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous, a popular word game similar to the Scrabble board game.

Hasbro, which owns the copyright and trademarks to Scrabble in North America, had filed its lawsuit in July against Rajat Agarwalla and his brother, Jayant Agarwalla. The Indian brothers in Calcutta had developed Scrabulous as a free Facebook application, which attracted millions of users.

A few weeks after Hasbro lobbed its lawsuit, the Agarwallas pulled down Scrabulous from Facebook and introduced a different word game called Wordscraper. Later, they also changed their website from Scrabulous to Lexulous.com.

Those changes appear to have satisfied the legal eagles at the Pawtucket, R.I., toy company, which dropped its suit Friday without comment.

-- Alex Pham

Image by RJ Softwares

Comments

[Patrick Dennis]

Lexulous was just Scrabulous (i.e. online Scrabble) with a different name. Neither the gameboard nor the rules of play were changed. This apparently was NOT enough for Hasboro. The suit was not dropped until the gameboard was changed so as not to duplicate the classic Scrabble gameboard, and the rules changed to give each player eight tiles instead of seven.