Sometimes it’s “game over” without a buzzer, bright lights, or a victory dance: social networking service Facebook took down the Scrabble clone Scrabulous from its North American site last month, and now it’s pulled the plug on the game on most of its international sites as well after receiving a formal complaint from Mattel, the company that owns the rights to Scrabble outside the United States. (In the U.S., rights to Scrabble are administered by Hasbro.)
For the time being, Scrabulous is still available in its creators’ native country of India, where the case is still pending before a court. According to comments from Jayant Agarwalla published in the Inside Facebook blog, Mattel sent its complaint on August 14. Agarwalla also expressed astonishment that Facebook would restrict access to the application even through the Indian court’s decision is still pending.
The dispute highlights the fine line Facebook is trying to walk with its developer community: on one hand, it wants to be an impartial platform that encourages application development, innovation, and a thriving community for its users. On the other hand, it risks alienating developers by preemptively taking sides when an application meets an external legal challenge.
For the time being, the Agarwalla brothers’ Scrabulous replacement, Wordscraper, is still available on Facebook; it may be sufficiently different from Scrabble to avoid additional legal action, although only time will tell.
