R.I.P. Scrabulous. Long live Wordscraper!

Today @ PC World:

The death of Scrabulous on Facebook may have been a sad event for many, but at least it was a short-lived one. Scrabulous is back, but under a new name and with some minor tweaks to avoid any copyright issues. And thus Wordscraper was born.

Scrabble v. Scrabulous

There is, on the one hand, having a legal right to one's intellectual property. On the other, there is the question: does it make business sense to assert that right to shut down an infringer?

Looking to cut down its main competition and most high-profile copycat in the growing market for social gaming, Hasbro has sued the two Indian brothers behind the popular Web game Scrabulous, which has more than half a million regular users on the social network Facebook.

Hasbro, the Rhode Island company that owns the trademark to the 60-year-old board game, Scrabble, on which Scrabulous is closely based, has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying that it infringes the company’s intellectual property. Facebook has not yet responded to or commented on the request.

A copy of the complaint is here (pdf).

As Josh Quitner writes, "[A]s a tech writer and life-long student of what passes for Internet economics, I’m baffled. Is Hasbro just a stupid Potato Head? Or is this a brilliant game of Stratego?" And Mike Masnick observes:

The Scrabulous/Hasbro situation is a perfect example of Matt Mason's thesis that "piracy" is almost never about "theft." It's almost always a market indicator that the market is unhappy with what's being offered. It's the market showing companies what they want.