Scrabulous no longer on Facebook for North Americans
“Scrabulous shut down, which is the right call to make. i mean, we have IP protection 4 a reason” - Jason Calacanis
This morning I read on the New York Times’ Bits Blog that Scrabulous has been shut down on Facebook for anyone inside North America.
I’m in agreement with Jason Calacanis on this one - just because Scrabulous is an online version of an existing game doesn’t mean that it’s outside the protection of the law.
It’s too bad for Hasbro that they didn’t catch on and make their own version of Scrabulous sooner (the iPhone app, on the other hand, seems to be doing very well) because they’ve lost a lot of revenue to Scrabulous and Hasbro will probably never get to enjoy the benefits of being the HUGE fad that Scrabulous was for a while on Facebook. Now we’ve been there, done that.
I think the days of passively protecting your IP are over. In other words, no company is going to be able to successfully prevent someone else from doing something. Just because you own the IP for Scrabble does not mean that you can prevent Scrabble from being on Facebook.
Instead companies need to proactively protect their IP: Get there first so you can own the space.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I would imagine that Hasbro would have some type of recourse against Facebook wouldn’t they? Using IP that belongs to someone else on the Facebook system would be a violation of their TOS, and if they did not enforce, wouldn’t they then be as culpable as the violators themselves?
I’m not sure how the legalities actually work out.
I know that Facebook has publicly said that they want to remain a “neutral platform” in this case, but you’re right that by being inactive they are, in effect, taking sides.
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