Hasbro bullies Scrabulous from Facebook

[pastorables]

This is better than a triple word score for Hasbro. The company has been able to get Facebook to disable the very popular Scrabulous application for U.S. and Canadian users. Scrabulous fans are reacting with anger, encouraging e-mails to Hasbro, creating "Bring back Scrabulous!" Facebook groups and other such stuff in the hopes that this game would be be brought back.

Stay tuned to see if the power of the blogosphere and other such "citizen uprisings" will produce anything, or if the "old school" corporate muckety-mucks will prevail.

I was a fan of Scrabulous, and was playing with several Facebook friends. Clearly we were playing a version of Scrabble with a name change, and Hasbro has every right to try and protect its game, trademarks, etc.

But I think Hasbro went about this the wrong way. Instead of strong-arming the two Indian inventors of Scrabulous by threatening lawsuits, etc., they should have worked with them on licensing the game or getting them to create a version of Scrabulous that Hasbro liked. Working together would have created some positive buzz around both companies, and the end users would have been able to still play their favorite game.

Instead, Hasbro bullied the Scrabulous inventors with lawsuits and then went and developed their own Scrabble application for Facebook, with mixed reviews. If you live in the U.S. and want to play with a London friend, you're out of luck – the licensing rules only allow you to play with friends from the same location. Others feel that by using the Scrabble application, they're siding with Hasbro in the dispute. Out of loyalty, they are deciding to not install the Scrabble app. Hasbro's actions in this are very un-Web 2.0, and yet they still want people to play their app, but by their rules.

Stay tuned to see how this battle shapes out. Hasbro gets a D for not realizing the value of the new community in this Web 2.0. I'm also upset that they disabled the application while I was in the middle of a game. I was about to place a really good bingo. www.networkworld.com

[Shellie]

Well, let me tell you....I had about 13 games going at the time and I was whipping butt in 10 of them. 2 of them were running neck and neck and one of them was actually quite embarrassing for me. While I couldn't pronounce his name, he was making mincemeat of me.

ANYWHO, all of those games just disappeared. No explanation, no letting me finish them. (or the guy with the unpronounable name finish me) Just poof...gone. All that time spent away from my dishes, laundry, and floors gone.

I loaded the Scrabble Beta app which DOESN'T WORK either.

So, yes...I'm ticked off at Hasbro. I'm thinking maybe I should delete my application now that I know WHAT happened.

[RamboPreacher]

good for Hasbro! I am glad they are keeping their copyrights close, as should be.

[Daniel]

I'm in the US, and Scrabulous on Facebook still works for me.