Scrabulous, though, has been the first serious threat and the most popular. There are other places to play Scrabble on the Internet. Some applications have slipped by unchecked. I am not a lawyer, but Hasbro and Mattel have, over the years, stopped people and companies from copying the game, using the name and the marks for commercial purposes. The companies haven't found a way to do what Scrabulous has done as we said, but that doesn't necessarily mean that somebody else has the legal right to do that. And what we've got here are essentially trademark and copyright infringement issues. And Hasbro and Mattel, in January, sent letters to Facebook and the brothers, asking them to shut down Scrabulous.
SIEGEL: Well, somebody else has and that has not made the manufacturers happy, obviously.įATSIS: Right. Hasbro traditionally sold about a million or so sets a year of Scrabble, but it's never found a way to reach the true masses particularly in the digital age. More than two million registered users, several hundred thousand daily users, and it demonstrates what I've always believed that there's this latent appeal in our brains to play this word game. It took off when it became a Facebook application, the popular social networking site, last year. They put up a site for their version of Scrabble. They are brothers who lived in Calcutta, India, and they have nothing to do with Hasbro or Mattel.
And Scrabulous was invented by two guys in 2005. Mattel owns the right to Scrabble in the rest of the world. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America. And a little background is in order here. There's a fight between the manufacturer of what a lover of retronyms might call terrestrial Scrabble, and an online version, that, to coin a phrase, is sweeping the nation. Stefan, your favorite game has never been in the news quite the way it has of late. Stefan is the author of the book "Word Freak," which chronicled the world of competitive Scrabble in which Stefan did for Scrabble roughly what Herman Melville did for whaling in the 19th century.
We'll talk with him as usual today, but about his other field of expertise - Scrabble and the business of Scrabble. Most Fridays, we talk about sports and the business of sports with Stefan Fatsis of the Wall Street Journal.
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