Scrabble, the board game in which you compete with other players in making words, has become a familiar household name since it was introduced in 1948. Its unofficial online double, Scrabulous, has become one of the most popular applications on social networking site Facebook since it was launched in July 2007.
Now, both games are making waves instead of words as Hasbro, the copyright holder for Scrabble in the US and Canada, has filed a lawsuit against the creators of Scrabulous—Kolkata-based brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla —following which Scrabulous was yanked off Facebook in late July. But in today’s fast-changing social networking environment, Hasbro’s lawsuit and its attempt to control its online image may not be the right move, the Wharton faculty say.
Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, believes Hasbro’s action is an “incredibly bad business decision”. There is no evidence that the Agarwalla brothers were doing “something absolutely disparaging” to the Scrabble brand, he says. In fact, Scrabulous “has been such a fabulously good thing for the Scrabble franchise (that) Hasbro should have been celebrating”.
(Illustration: Malay Karmakar / Mint)
It is not clear if Hasbro did the right thing by going after Scrabulous, says Kevin Werbach, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. “Many copyright owners today are over-inclusive as they try to assert their rights. The question for Hasbro is whether the benefit they get in terms of direct and indirect revenue from their own Scrabble game exceeds the cost of negative publicity from this action. But it certainly got them a black eye in the online community, although most people who play Scrabble have no idea this has happened.”
However, Werbach sees some merit in the arguments favouring copyright owners, too. “If someone had sold a board game called Scrabulous that is just like Scrabble, then people wouldn’t object to the company trying to shut it down as an infringer,” he says. “So fundamentally, I am not sure why this is a different situation.”
According to Fader, many companies sue “just because they think they have the right to instead of pursuing what’s in their shareholders’ best interests.” It is “irrelevant if Hasbro was right or not” in its copyright claims against the backdrop of how Scrabble benefited from Scrabulous, he says. “One is the downside they have created for themselves and the other is a lack of an upside.”
Companies “need to move aside from knee-jerk tendencies to bring in legal action”, he adds, noting that Hasbro had other options besides suing. It could have formed a partnership with the Agarwalla brothers, he says, or bought them out. “It would have been smart to pay (the Agarwalla brothers) millions of dollars. That would have been minuscule compared to legal fees and their own application development expenses... Hasbro may have won the battle but it has surely lost the war.”
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