Mattel Asks Facebook to Remove Online "Scrabble" Knock-off

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on January 16, 2008 - 10:14am.

London - Toymaker Mattel (NYSE: MAT), which owns the rights to the board game Scrabble outside of North America, has asked the online social network Facebook to remove an online knock-off called "Scrabulous" from its site, Reuters reports.

The move comes after fellow toymaker Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, reportedly took similar actions.

"Letters have been sent to Facebook in the United States regarding the Scrabulous application," a Mattel spokeswoman in Britain told Reuters. "Mattel values its intellectual property and actively protects its brands and trademarks."

The "Scrabulous" application has 2.3 million active users on Facebook, and has attracted 70 million page views in the past month, Fortune.com reported.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/1xkv3 (Reuters)

http://snipurl.com/1xg8k (Forbes.com)

http://www.scrabulous.com

http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous

Published in DMW Daily, January 16, 2008

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Comments

Scrabbulous - leave it alone!

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on January 16, 2008 - 4:53pm.

what a bunch of muppets. why take it down? are all the online players suddenly going to rush and buy the board game and somehow play people on the other side of the world with it? no doubt mattel just wants to cash in at the end of the day. they lose nothing but have everything to gain so are happy to screw over anybody to that end.