Scrabulous Voluntarily Taken Offline by Developers, NOT Shut Down by Facebook
This morning, Vindu Goel at the NYT reported that Scrabulous, the popular Facebook game and Scrabble clone, had been shut down. Just last week, Hasbro, owner of Scrabble IP in North America, filed a DMCA claim against the makers of the game.
However, it appears that the take-down was not Facebook’s doing. Instead, it was a voluntary move by the Agarwalla Brothers (see Inside Facebook interview here) while they sort out their legal matters in North America. Scrabulous remains accessible elsewhere in the world. They write,
Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.
Facebook itself has chosen to stay out of the matter, and not get in the middle of the DMCA issues at hand between Hasbro and the Agarwallas. While Facebook is imposing a clearer policy on developers these days based on the design and functionality of their applications, it’s choosing to not impose itself as the arbiter of IP claims on application developers, but rather to remain a neutral intermediary instead.
July 29th, 2008 at 9:05 am
[...] > Read more at Inside Facebook digg_skin = ‘compact’; digg_bgcolor = ‘#000000′; Bookmark This [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[...] to reports, Scrabulous isn’t dead. The game has simply been turned off in the US and Canada, where the legal trouble has been aimed. [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
[...] this afternoon, though, Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook as well as Justin Smith at Inside Facebook both received word from the Argarwalla brothers that the exact details are slightly different from [...]
July 30th, 2008 at 9:01 am
[...] this afternoon, though, Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook as well as Justin Smith at Inside Facebook both received word from the Argarwalla brothers that the exact details are slightly different from [...]
July 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
We keep seeing all the news about this game and the uproar it’s caused but are confused — was the game that good?
July 30th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Update – I think Facebook has taken Scrabulous down now. Their app URL gives a 404.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:31 am
[...] month after the Agarwalla brothers took Scrabulous offline in North America, Scrabulous has disappeared for Facebook users in the UK and Australia, and other locations around [...]
December 16th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
[...] Scrabble, naming Scrabulous creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla the defendants. The duo took Scrabulous down in [...]
March 30th, 2009 at 8:37 am
[...] creators of Scrabulous, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, and game-maker, Hasbro, ultimately led to the voluntary shut down of the Facebook application. The suit centered around Hasbro’s intellectual property rights, as the app was claimed to [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 11:00 am
[...] Zynga’s Texas Hold’Em Poker has proven to be one of the more durable social games on Facebook. Most newer card games that have sought to dethrone it have also limited themselves the same style of poker play. Well, a new app by the name of Broadway Poker is changing that by offering not one, but four ways to play. The developer, notably, is the Agarwalla brothers, the folks behind early social gaming hit Scrabulous, a title that helped show the potential of social gaming before running into intellectual property issues. [...]