Gawker: valleywag, jayant agarwalla

Scrabulous returns wearing fake moustache, calls itself Wordscraper

Jackson West — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:40:00 EDT

Wordscraper is the latest Facebook game that looks remarkably like Scrabble from developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. The new name and new look will hopefully be enough to keep the law dogs from Hasbro and Electronic Arts from running it out of town like they did to Scrabulous. Besides the new name and the new color scheme, players are allowed to modify the board and futz with the rules.

If it ends up looking like Scrabble, it'll be the users who are infringing on copyrights, not the creators. One problem Wordscraper might have in becoming as popular as Scrabulous once was? Scrabulous has completely disappeared from Facebook profiles, meaning members will have to look for and re-select Wordscraper. When searching apps for "Scrabble," finding the official version is much easier, and Facebook has made it harder for apps to spread from user to user on the social network. So, anyone up for a game of Attack?

Hasbro sues Scrabulous creators, who could have gotten away with it

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:20:00 EDT

Hasbro, maker of board game Scrabble, has filed suit in a New York court against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the brothers who created Scrabulous, a Facebook-app version of the game. Hasbro also filed a DMCA notice with Facebook, asking that the company remove the game from its website because it infringes on Hasbro's copyright. I'm not a lawyer, and neither is Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman — but he has managed to get away with his own bit of copying other people's games, turning Tetris into Blockles and Pictionary into Draw My Thing, for example. Forman tells us that the Agarwallas would be totally in the clear if they'd only copied Scrabble's rules in building Scrabulous. Game rules can't be copyrighted, argues Forman. But since the Scrabulous guys also copied the physical appearance of the Scrabble board — which can be copyrighted — Forman thinks they're screwed.