Mattel and Hasbro who the worldwide rights to the Scrabble game are suing the creators of Scrabulous, one of Facebook’s most popular applications for copyright infringement.
Scrabulous attracts over 600,000 daily users and nets the 20-something Indian brothers who created the application, $25,000 worth of advertising each month. So Hasbro has asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous.
This is where Legal deparments don’t understand social networks.
- The Scrabulous fans are passionate about the game and are not happy about Hasbro’s heavy handedness.
- Already, there are over 55,000 members in a Save Scrabulous Facebook Group that are talking of a boycott of all Mattel and Hasbro products.
So what should Hasbro and Matel do instead ?
- Consider buying Scrabulous and use the passionate fans to evangelise scrabble as a learning game.
- Hire the Scrabulous creators to develop online versions for other social networks.
- Sponsor competitions of the online game.
- Allow fans to create personalised scrabble games which they can design online.
