Welcome to Lexulous - It's the fun word game you can play online. For free! - Play online with friends or other players - Option to play over emails as well - Also play solo / against the PC, sign up now! Welcome to Lexulous! Lexulous a fun word game for all ages. Sign up to play. It's free and always will be. Try a game with Lex Robot We’ve already started the game below, it’s your turn! To play Lexulous live, match friends, or play with random opponents, sign up now >> Loading game, please wait... Lexulous - The Full Wiki The Full Wiki Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles . Related top topics From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Lexulous Current status Active Lexulous (formerly Scrabulous), is an online word game based on the commercial board game Scrabble . It is run by an Indian company of the same name on the dedicated website at and is also available within the social networking site Facebook .

The Scrabulous web site was launched in 2005, and the game was added to Facebook as an application in 2007, quickly becoming the most popular game on Facebook. In 2008 the game was removed from Facebook, first for North American users and later worldwide, because of copyright infringement lawsuits. The original Web site was shut down as of 25 September 2008. Users attempting to access it were advised "The site is taking a coffee break. Sorry for the inconvenience". On September 26, 2008, the scrabulous.com site had been fully replaced with a GoDaddy.com placeholder page. This is a result of the ruling by Delhi High Court that Calcutta-based Rajat Agarwalla, 27, and Jayant Agarwalla, 22, retained the right to post their word game online, but were not allowed to use Scrabulous, Scrabble or any other “similar sounding” name. [1] On September 27, 2008 a site was launched at , with access to the old database of scrabulous.com users.

It has a Live version and Practice Mode, and an option for play by email . On December 20, 2008 Hasbro withdrew their lawsuit against RJ Softwares. [2] And on 1 January 2009, Lexulous was reactivated on Facebook starting with 0 monthly active users. As of March 23, the application has about 585,000 monthly active users. EA's version has about 586,000 while RealNetwork's version has 357,000 users. Contents 7 References Creation The Scrabulous company was founded by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, both commerce graduates of St. Xavier's College, Kolkata , India . Scrabulous.com was created at the end of 2005, [3] after the Agarwalla brothers, Rajat (26) who holds a degree in business administration and Jayant (21) an undergraduate who has won numerous Scrabble tournaments, felt the need for a free gaming site where the popular game could be played. It was initially made available as BingoBinge.com.

On July 5, 2006, the site was moved to Scrabulous.com. A new logo was introduced in January 2008 by J.Pink Design. [4] Users A game in progress on Facebook The website has 20,000 registered users, [3] but after the developers made an application for the popular social networking website Facebook it has been added to 840,000 user pages, [5] with more than 500,000 users daily, [6] [7] giving it "the most active users of any game that can be played over Facebook". [8] Legal and copyright issues There were certain legal issues involved regarding Scrabulous because it very closely resembles Scrabble , exactly copying the board layout and rules, and formerly the number of tiles, and having a very similar name. The rights to the Scrabble game are currently owned within the US and Canada by Hasbro , and throughout the rest of the world by Mattel . According to Anthony Falzone, head of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University , copyright laws do not allow someone to freely copy the particular expression of an idea.

[9] In his article in the Wall Street Journal , Jamin Brophy-Warren has said that Hasbro Inc has refused to comment on legal matters, while the creators have mentioned informing the company about their site. [10] The former Scrabulous website made several references to Scrabble, and previously promoted itself as the best place to play Scrabble online. [11] Rumors suggest that in January 2008, Hasbro made an attempt to acquire Scrabulous for an undisclosed sum in the $10 million range. [12] The game had been generating advertising revenue of over $25,000 per month for the Agarwalla brothers. [13] The Agarwallas refused to sell their application to Hasbro, instead requesting a "multiple" of $10 million. It was reported that the Agarwallas had also been looking for other potential suitors who would be willing to pay higher premiums. [14] In January 2008, Hasbro threatened to shut Scrabulous down via legal means. [15] Facebook was also asked to pull Scrabulous from the site's application database.

[16] Until 28 July 2008 the game had not been removed by Facebook, which had refused to confirm Hasbro's request to remove the game. [17] As of October 2007, the term Scrabulous was registered as a trademark and service mark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but on February 2008 it was officially abandoned by the applicant. [18] [19] Mattel launched its official version of online Scrabble, Scrabble by Mattel , on Facebook in late March 2008. [20] [21] The application was developed by Gamehouse , a division of RealNetworks who has been licensed by Mattel. [21] However since Hasbro controls the right for North America with the rights for the rest of the world belonging to Mattel, [20] the Facebook application is available only to players outside the United States and Canada.

[21] Ownership of the rights to Scrabble by multiple companies is limiting the introduction of the game to Facebook [21] and, between its launch date and 6 April 2008, fewer than 2000 users had registered, compared with 600,000 registered Scrabulous users. [21] RealNetworks has stated that the application is currently in its beta stage and there have been reports of a number of bugs and limitations. [21] Scrabulous users have reacted to Hasbro's announcement asking Facebook to shut it down by creating a group called Save Scrabulous [22] on Facebook. [7] Reportedly more than 54,000 fans have joined this group. It has also been reported that fans have been writing to Hasbro and Mattel demanding that the companies make "the right decision", [7] and have threatened to stop buying Mattel and Hasbro products if they shut down Scrabulous.

[21] In reaction to the news that the Facebook application was in legal jeopardy, two groups made a "SCRABULOUS" music video spoof of the Fergie song "Glamorous." The video from web entertainment group TastesLikeTV.com [23] professes "L, T, S, and R / Ain't gonna get you very far," while the YouTube video created by Team Awesome Productions says that Scrabulous is the "swappy, swappy." [24] Both viral web videos were mentioned in the February 22, 2008 issue of Entertainment Weekly . On July 24, 2008, Hasbro formally sued Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, along with their company, RJ Softwares. The suit claims Scrabulous violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and infringes upon Hasbro's intellectual property rights. [25] On July 29, 2008, Scrabulous was shut down on Facebook for users in North America, with the error message, "Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice.

If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here." Hasbro , the owner of the rights to Scrabble in North America has released a free legal version of Scrabble for Facebook, developed by Hasbro and Electronic Arts . [26] On 22 August 2008, the application was blocked by Facebook in all countries except India. [27] On 26 September 2008, the web site at was suspended. This followed a ruling by the Delhi High Court that although the game Scrabble itself could not be copyrighted, and the Agarwalla brothers could therefore continue to offer their similar game online, they would not be permitted to use the name Scrabulous or any other name similar to that of Scrabble. [28] On 27 September 2008, the game became available once more, with the new name Lexulous.com. There was a makeover, but the essential elements of the old game had been retained, along with all past records, user IDs and saved information intact. On December 3, 2008, Lexulous announced the fact that users might notice "minor changes" in the game, which would be explained later.

The score multipliers have changed in layout from Scrabble (including a 4x multiplier for the first time) and the point scores for the tiles no longer match those of Scrabble. In addition a player is given 8 tiles to play with instead of the traditional 7 tiles. On December 4, 2008, the 4x multiplier was removed from the game play. Advertisements Main article: Wordscraper A game design application (the design space of which almost includes Scrabble) has received an influx of people from the recent closure of Scrabulous in North America. Much of the popular press reports inaccurately that Wordscraper was released after Scrabulous was shut down. It has in fact been available on Facebook since January 2008. [29] Media and popularity Being one of the very first applications launched on Facebook, Scrabulous enjoyed relatively large popularity on the social networking site . It was recently featured in PC World's 100 best products of 2008, [30] and appeared in a question in the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? . See also War of the Words: Scrabulous Is off Facebook, but Did Hasbro Win the Game?

- Knowledge@Wharton War of the Words: Scrabulous Is off Facebook, but Did Hasbro Win the Game? Aug 06, 2008 Scrabble — the board game in which you compete with other players in making words — has become a familiar household name since December 1948, when the game was granted a copyright application and a trademark was registered in the U.S. Since then, it has sold more than 100 million sets in 121 countries in 29 different languages. Scrabulous — an unofficial, online version of Scrabble — is perhaps lesser known, but since its launch in July 2007, it has become one of the most popular applications on social networking site Facebook. In early August, it had 1,331,840 monthly active users; at its peak it was attracting 600,000 players a day. (See “ Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System .”) Combined, the two games are not only creating words but also making waves among online users, application developers and copyright experts: On July 24, Hasbro, which owns the rights to the game in the U.S.

and Canada, filed suit in federal court in New York City against Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, the Calcutta-based brothers who created Scrabulous. Facebook has since pulled the application in North America. (Mattel, which owns the Scrabble rights in the rest of the world, had earlier issued cease-and-desist letters to the Agarwalla brothers, but they ignored them.) The online community sees this as a replay of the traditional story of a small developer David taking on a Goliath corporation. Another application called Save Scrabulous has been started on Facebook and a petition has already attracted more than 10,000 signatures. Meanwhile, the Agarwallas have introduced a new word game, called “Wordscraper,” which is already gaining traction from Facebook users. On the corporate side, the issue is less about money than copyright infringement and brand control. Wharton faculty note, however, that Hasbro may be doing more harm than good to its brand by going after Scrabulous. It not only risks alienating existing Scrabulous users, they say, but also misses the opportunity to capitalize on Scrabulous’s success in the difficult-to-harness social networking world.

Peter Fader , co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative , believes Hasbro’s action is an “incredibly bad business decision.” There is no evidence 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.” It’s 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 favoring 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.” ‘Clunky’ Alternatives At the moment, the two Agarwalla brothers — Rajat, 27, and Jayant, 22 — are not answering questions about the case.

“As the Scrabulous matter is before the courts, our lawyers have recommended that we do not appear in the media or give comments to the press as it might compromise the case,” they said in an email. The two run a relatively low-profile, 30-person company in Calcutta called RJ Softwares. The company describes itself as “an established IT solutions provider” and “offshore development partner.” Occupying a place of pride on the company’s website, as a sample of its work, is Scrabulous.com: “Scrabulous is an amazing word game. It is entirely web-based. At Scrabulous, you get a top-notch rating system, a state-of-the-art game room and user profiles with images. The interface exudes perfection, minimalism and above all, functionality,” the site says. Scrabulous has been around since July 2006, but it started making waves only when it was launched on Facebook last summer. Hasbro and Mattel have been after the brothers since early this year. Money is not really an issue here: Scrabulous.com makes about $25,000 a month in advertising — an amount that will hardly add to Hasbro’s bottomline.

So why did the two companies wait so long to take action? According to Hasbro’s official reply to Scrabulous fans, they did not want to make any move without providing an alternative to thousands of Scrabble aficionados, even if they were playing an illegal version. Hasbro commissioned Electronic Arts, the Redwood City, Calif.-based electronic gaming giant, to come out with its own version of online Scrabble. It’s available on Facebook in a beta version, only for the U.S. and Canada. It hasn’t been particularly well received: On Facebook, it has a user rating of 1.2 out of 5 and 191,764 monthly active players. It is clunky, according to users, and the “beta” tag implies that more improvements are necessary. “I’d be okay with you forcing out Scrabulous, if you had a decent application to replace it with,” says one user’s posting on the Scrabble website. “But this one is a joke!” Mattel, meanwhile, has its own version of online Scrabble, called Scrabble Worldwide, on Facebook.

It has been developed by Gamehouse, a game developer and gaming portal, and has a rating of 1.7 out of 5 and 63,905 monthly active users. This version also has its share of detractors, mostly because of users’ inability to play against friends in the U.S. and Canada, which are covered by Hasbro’s beta version. In an uncomplicated age before the arrival of the Internet, it was perfectly possible for companies to carve out regions and own the same brands in different countries. Now, brands have straddled the web, so users have the spectacle of one official online Scrabble (Hasbro) vying for honors with another official Scrabble (Mattel). ‘Platform Economics’ Werbach expects to see more conflicts surrounding applications in the social networking arena, noting that their number and severity depend upon how sites like Facebook manage their platforms. “I am sure there will be conflicts because the boundaries are not too well defined,” he says. “The theory of platform economics suggests that a platform operator actually has an incentive to facilitate the optimum level of activity on its platform,” Werbach notes.

“Facebook benefits by having lots of applications, even though the applications are making money and Facebook isn’t on the applications themselves — it gets more users, it gets more activity and so forth.” The owners of platforms may not always appreciate the benefits of having those applications on their sites, he adds. Werbach adds that a potential risk for Facebook is if users increasingly identify the application as the source of value and not Facebook itself. “A thoughtful approach here [for Facebook] is not to see it necessarily as a conflict but to see the benefits the application brings,” he says. The fallout of legal conflicts like the present one is significant especially because of the pedigrees of the participants. “What’s interesting on Facebook is you have large, venture-funded startups that are staking their business on building applications on Facebook and other social networking platforms,” he says. “It’s not just a bunch of small guys.” The Scrabulous-Hasbro spat, however, won’t likely be a deterrent for other application developers, suggests Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of information technology at Wharton. “All the opportunities [for application developers] that were there prior to this are still there.

If you have an application that fits, Scrabulous has proven how popular some things can become by being hosted on a popular social networking site like Facebook. The fact that you need to have an original game where you have free and clear intellectual property doesn’t mean that there is any less opportunity to take advantage of the reach, the distribution and the built-in platform features that social networking sites give you.” Up Next: Wordscraper? In fact, in the midst of this face-off comes Wordscraper on Facebook. Launched in February 2008 by the Agarwallas, it has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 and, now that Scrabulous has vanished, a tally of 133,046 monthly active users. Wordscraper allows users to build and play their own word games, creating new designs and experimenting with the layout of the board. A unique option is Wordscraper Blitz. It is played in real time and allows hundreds of players to compete simultaneously with each other. The new game differs visually from traditional Scrabble and offers players new flexibility. Instead of the square letter tiles people are familiar with, they are now round.

The special tiles (double word score, triple letter score, etc.) are not fixed; they can be placed wherever users want them. Most people place them the way they are on a traditional Scrabble board. Wordscraper is one subject the Agarwallas are willing to talk about. “We are very happy with the response Wordscraper has received,” says Jayant Agarwalla. “It had the highest activity level among all applications on Facebook [on August 3]. Right now, we are working on a number of new features and user requests. Primarily, we shall improve the navigation and interface of the application.” Hasbro and Mattel are believed to be looking at Wordscraper now. It may invite their wrath soon, and more court cases could follow. Indian cyberlaws have not yet been fine-tuned, and it would probably be up to the courts in the U.S. to pass judgment. At the moment, the legal issues surrounding the Scrabulous case are foggy. “We are not sure whether Scrabulous has been sued for copyright, trademark or patent violation,” says open source evangelist Venkatesh Hariharan.

A mutually acceptable model to monetize the efforts of various players in the business of social networking platforms may emerge, but Werbach isn’t betting on it any time soon. “Clearly, we are in fast-changing times in this environment of social network platforms, and there will be more equilibrium points that develop,” he says. “It’s not necessarily obvious that there is a model that is a win-win for everyone. The shares of the rents from this market are not necessarily equal, and the costs also are not exactly equal.” Fader sees an increasing shift of power in the online world. “The old adage that content is king no longer holds — distribution is the ace in the hole,” he says. “There are so many examples — especially related to YouTube — where getting your offering out there to a wider audience is surely a good thing.” Fader sees fewer and fewer copyright owners resorting to legal action like Hasbro. “We are at that turning point where this kind of Hasbro action is becoming more the exception than the rule,” he says. “We’ll soon get to the point — it may take years — where this kind of thing will not happen.” In the meantime, the Agarwallas already have another application on Facebook.

That’s Chess Pro, and there are no copyright complications as chess is several centuries old. But users are making various suggestions for the next Facebook application: Leading the list is “Wordwalla.” Citing Knowledge@Wharton Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words - The New York Times The New York Times Business Day |Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words Search Continue reading the main story NEW DELHI — The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users. Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once. Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else. In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company.

Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game. Continue reading the main story Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Our family has been playing the game for 50 years now,” he said, and received a set when the game first came out in India . His mother encouraged him and his 26-year-old brother, Rajat, to play as a learning tool, often with a dictionary by the board. Scrabulous, which most users play on the Facebook social-networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble, and the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages. There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics, and it does not allow fake words.

It cannot, however, prevent players from cheating. One method is an unaffiliated online “helper” program, which generates a list of possible words based on the letters a user has. Two game companies, RealNetworks of Seattle and Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., say they have signed deals with Hasbro to create online versions of the company’s games. Both say their versions of Scrabble will be out shortly. But Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated. The threat of legal action has not gained the companies many admirers. Many Scrabulous fans, some of whom say they bought the board game for the first time after playing the online version on Facebook, call their approach heavy-handed and out of touch. “The big thing that Hasbro is missing is that this is targeting a young audience that in general is not into board games,” said Venkat Koduru, the 15-year-old founder of the Facebook group “Save Scrabulous.” Photo Rajat Agarwalla, left, and his brother, Jayant, face legal threats that could halt Scrabulous. Credit J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times Mr.

Koduru had three Scrabulous games going as of Wednesday. He has gathered names of more than 1,000 people who have pledged to never buy a Scrabble board if Hasbro and Mattel shut down the online game. Other groups devoted to saving the game have recently been created on Facebook, including “Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too.” Tens of thousands of fans have joined in, threatening to boycott Hasbro and Mattel products. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Iain Morgan, 34, a music producer in London who goes by the name Iain Easy, is playing 25 games of Scrabulous at the same time. The funny thing is, he said, he was never a fan of the original board game. Mr. Morgan, who is the host of a Facebook group called “Help, I’m a Scrabulous Addict,” attributes the game’s popularity to “all these people who are bored at work in their office,” and added that the game keeps him in regular contact with his mother. The legal questions concerning Scrabulous are complicated by the interests of the companies that own the rights to Scrabble.

Harold Zeitz, senior vice president for games at RealNetworks, said Friday that he was working closely with the Agarwalla brothers to bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users. Hasbro, meanwhile, said in a statement that Electronic Arts was planning to release an online version of Scrabble this spring. And Mattel, which signed a deal with RealNetworks last July, says that settling with the Agarwallas would set a bad precedent. Neither Hasbro nor Mattel would disclose the number of Scrabble board games they have sold since Scrabulous started becoming popular last year. Hasbro estimates it sells one million to two million Scrabble boards a year in North America. To some online marketing experts, Scrabulous represents a turning point for the board game industry, which has struggled for years to recreate itself as new generations turned to alternatives like the Xbox and the GameBoy. “If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr.

Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said. For their part, Mattel and Hasbro are trying to protect their franchise as consumers turn increasingly to the Internet for entertainment. They say they consider Scrabble a crown jewel and are working on marketing campaigns for the game’s 60th anniversary this year. The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board. Photo The extremely popular game Scrabulous is played primarily on the Facebook social-networking site. Credit Scrabulous.com Scrabble began as Lexico in 1931, the creation of an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts. He determined the frequency of each letter in the game and its value by reviewing the front page of The New York Times. His patent was denied, and it was 17 years before he found a manufacturer, which renamed the game Scrabble. It took many more years before Scrabble became popular, thanks in part to a Macy’s chairman who was a fan, according to the game’s official history.

The Scrabble brand in North America was passed from manufacturer to manufacturer. It landed with Hasbro in 1989. The British game maker J. W. Spear & Sons owned the rights outside North America until the company was bought by Mattel in 1994. The board game has had a core group of close-knit, intense fans for decades. They attend tournaments, refer to amateurs as “living room players,” and memorize lists of two-letter words. Until Scrabulous landed on Facebook, no one could have mistaken the game, which had only a few thousand users, for a fast-growing phenomenon. The Agarwallas introduced their first Scrabble knockoff Web site, bingobinge.com , in August 2005, and renamed it Scrabulous.com a year later. In May 2007, one of the site’s users suggested they adapt the game as a Facebook application, and it took off. Advertisement Continue reading the main story After 25 years with the National Scrabble Association, John D.

Williams Jr., the executive director, said he had seen numerous copyright infringements of Scrabble, but the Scrabulous program on Facebook was the most “widespread and intense.” Dozens of other Web sites offer unauthorized versions of Scrabble, but most force users to play in real time or require clunky downloads to play. “People believe it to be in the public domain, like chess,” Mr. Williams said. “The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don’t or are unwilling to accept.” The Agarwalla brothers are avid players themselves — Jayant had 14 Scrabulous games going as of Saturday, and Rajat was playing 19. Jayant, who is responsible for the game’s player interface and customer support, said, “People rarely find time to sit down anymore with their family and friends, to invite people over, to prepare the tea and biscuits.” Even though it is easy to cheat at Scrabulous, he says he thinks few players actually do. “You may be doing it for personal glory, but it really takes the fun out of the game,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Hasbro Sues Scrabulous For Making Scrabble Popular Again | Techdirt Hasbro Sues Scrabulous For Making Scrabble Popular Again from the don't-you-ever-do-that-again dept For months, Hasbro and Mattel had been threatening the makers of Scrabulous with a lawsuit for daring to do what the gaming companies had been unwilling to do: make a fun version of Scrabble available on Facebook in a way that got many people playing the game on a regular basis. It took nearly 9 months, but Hasbro finally put a version of Scrabble on Facebook itself, and now that it's up has finally officially filed the lawsuit . It's rather telling that Hasbro waited until its own version was online to file the lawsuit. What the company is basically admitting is that Scrabulous was a great promotional vehicle for Scrabble (otherwise why leave it up?), but now that Hasbro is competing with Scrabulous online, it wants to cut out that competition.

Hasbro's General Counsel is being quite misleading in saying: "Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties." That's not quite true. There is no "obligation" to sue someone who made your game popular again just because you were late to the game. Scrabulous showed Hasbro that there was a huge market for their game. There was no indication that Hasbro had any interest in Scrabble for Facebook prior to Scrabulous' success. Then there's this bizarre quote from Hasbro's GM of digital initiatives: "Hasbro has always had the same two priorities. One is to offer a great playing authentic game for fans and the second is to protect our intellectual property. This was theft of I.P., plain and simple." Really? Your second biggest priority is to protect your IP? Then why did you wait all this time to sue? Clearly there was a benefit in leaving Scrabulous up while your own version was being developed. Clearly the comparison to "theft" is incorrect. No one would let "theft" go on for months on end before suing, just so they could create their own competitive offering.

The Scrabulous/Hasbro situation is a perfect example of Matt Mason's thesis that "piracy" is almost never about "theft." It's almost always a market indicator that the market is unhappy with what's being offered. It's the market showing companies what they want. Featured Articles about Scrabble Game - Page 2 - latimes FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT SCRABBLE GAME - PAGE 2 NEWS Game Conquered the U.S. One Tile at a Time July 22, 2001 | BERNADETTE MURPHY, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES The board game we know as Scrabble was invented by Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect, in 1933 when the difficulties of the Depression began to seem unending. Butts thought that people needed a distraction during hard times. He'd researched other games and wanted to create one that mixed strategy, skill and luck. Growing up, Butts had played the word game Anagrams, in which players drew letters one by one from a jumble and attempted to make words. Advertisement A word from Scrabble owner: lawsuit July 25, 2008 | Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer Hasbro Inc. made its move.

The owner of Scrabble filed suit Thursday against the developers of Scrabulous, a word game played by millions of Facebook users each month. "We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property," said Barry Nagler, Hasbro's general counsel. Hasbro also sent a letter to Facebook asking the social networking site to shut down Scrabulous. As of noon Pacific time Thursday, the game was still up. Filed in the Southern District of New York federal court, the suit against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla and their company, RJ Softwares, claims copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This month Hasbro introduced a beta version of its official Scrabble game on Facebook. ENTERTAINMENT Dan Rather's Metaphors Anchored in Folksy Truisms November 14, 2000 | STEVE JOHNSON, CHICAGO TRIBUNE In high-stress, high-drama situations such as live election coverage, CBS anchor Dan Rather can be counted on to come up with some metaphors that are as unusual as a Bush family Scrabble game or an Al Gore understatement.

So-called "Ratherisms" are a national tradition by now--one that, archaically but winningly, puts the emphasis back on spoken words and takes it away from all of TV's instant graphics and maps cluttered by blinking lights and spinning text. SPORTS At This Rate, Texas Would Be a Longshot December 25, 2005 | Grahame L. Jones, Times Staff Writer Penn State versus USC at the Rose Bowl on Jan. 4? That's the scenario that would have played out had the bowl championship series formula given equal weight to graduation rates along with the two polls and computer aggregate, according to the Miami Herald's Jeff Shain. Texas, with the fifth-worst graduation rate in Division I-A football, would not be anywhere near Pasadena. ENTERTAINMENT MOVIE REVIEW : 'Mr. Wilt': A Real Misadventure June 29, 1990 | MICHAEL WILMINGTON Few novels seem more suited for the screen than Britisher Tom Sharpe's.

Few have been more botched in translation than the new movie made from Sharpe's 1976 "Wilt." Like water into wine or, more properly, stale beer, Sharpe's classic of paranoid comedy has been switched hesto-presto, into a thick-headed, frenetic farce called "The Misadventures of Mr. Wilt" (at the Westside Pavilion). Stories as achingly funny as Sharpe's are rare enough. Why filch them and throw them away? NEWS Facebook reinvents Scrabulous August 3, 2008 | Alex Pham Scrabulous is back on Facebook, but with a new name and a different look. The Scrabble knockoff that was pulled from Facebook on Tuesday by its creators over a copyright and trademark dispute was brought back to life late Wednesday. It's now called Wordscraper. The game play is very similar to Scrabulous, aside from a few tweaks, such as round letter tiles instead of square, a new point system and a few different ways of playing. So, will this satisfy Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to Scrabble and sued the India-based creators of Scrabulous last week?

BUSINESS Awaiting word from Hasbro August 1, 2008 | Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer Scrabulous is back on Facebook, but with a new name and a different look. The Scrabble knockoff that was pulled from Facebook by its creators over a copyright and trademark dispute was brought back to life late Wednesday. It's now called Wordscraper. The game play is very similar to Scrabulous, aside from a few tweaks such as round letter tiles instead of square, a new point system and a few different ways of playing. Hasbro Inc. BUSINESS Scrabble seeks big score in Web battle July 9, 2008 | Anick Jesdanun, The Associated Press C-O-M-P-E-T-E. Developers of a highly popular but unauthorized version of Scrabble for the online hangout Facebook vowed Tuesday to do just that, now that a video game maker has weighed in with an official version of the word game. Jayant Agarwalla, co-creator of the unauthorized Scrabulous, suggested that Electronic Arts Inc. would have a tough time attracting "the attention and patronage of a large and dedicated user base" as Scrabulous has with nearly half a million daily users.

NEWS JAUNTS : Overcast Days Are Best Time to Explore Sulphur Mountain : Hikers and bikers can take in the misty glens and wildflowers, avoiding the relentless head and dust of summer. May 4, 1995 | PANCHO DOLL, TIMES STAFF WRITER During this season of heavy marine layers and persistent overcast, outdoors lovers have had one word on their lips: bummer. The sky is gray. The water is gray. There is no horizon and the whole coastal strip looks monotonic and mournful. Taken all together, it seems like a great time to work on your Scrabble game. But conditions are also ideal to hike or bike up Sulphur Mountain Road, just north of Casitas Springs from the turnoff at California 33. BUSINESS Staying a Spell at the Addictive Scrabble Site October 28, 1996 | TROY CORLEY, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES Harold Ramis, actor and director, used to be a Super Mario Bros. junkie. But these days, he gets his gaming fix from Scrabble--electronic Scrabble, that is.

Ramis was flexing his word acumen last week at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, taking on "Ghostbusters" pal Rick Moranis, who was at an Internet cafe in New York, for the bicoastal premiere of a new Internet-playable Scrabble CD-ROM, produced by Hasbro Interactive. Lexulous - Tips and Cheats Lexulous August 17, 2013 | | Add a Comment Playing word puzzles like crosswords is a good way to keep your brain sharp and improve your vocabulary. In addition, you can play many of them against your family or friends, which is a good way to bond with them. One of the classic and most played word puzzles is Scrabble which has spawned similar games including the fun crossword game Lexulous. History of Lexulous Lexulous was formerly called Scrabulous, a game developed and run by an Indian company of the same name under the supervision of the brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. The brothers, having won a lot of Scrabble tournaments, felt that the classic game should have a site where it can be played for free. At first, the site the brothers created was called BingoBinge in 2005.

On July 5, 2006, the site was renamed Scrabulous which then became a popular Facebook application in 2007. However, in 2008, because of some lawsuits involving copyright infringements particularly because of its resemblance to Scrabble, the game was removed from Facebook and the Scrabulous site was also taken down. Later on, the Delhi High Court granted the company to reinstate the game online, but under a different name. Hence, on September 27, 2008, the new website was launched with the name Lexulous and, in January 2009, the game also returned to Facebook. It has an average of at least half a million Facebook users per month. How to play First, you need to choose what kind of game you’d like to play: online or offline. If you play it online, you can sign in with your Facebook account, your email, or even your phone contacts. Using your Facebook account to play the game means your opponents will be your friends. If you use your email, you will be asked for a username and password and Lexulous will create an account for you.

If you play the game offline, you will be presented with three options: play against your device (the AI), yourself (solitaire), or against an opponent (play and pass). If you choose the latter two, you will be asked to choose the dictionary you prefer: US or UK English, French, or Italian. Whichever mode you pick, the first player (usually you go first), needs to begin forming a word that will include the star in the center of the board. Depending on your location or the version of the game you’re playing, you can have either 7 or 8 letter tiles. On the game’s website, players outside Canada and the US have 7 tiles. Words can be formed horizontally and vertically, and whether you are playing against an opponent or yourself, you take turns in making a move. A total of 88 (including two blanks that can stand for any letter) tiles are available and with each move you make, fresh tiles will appear on your rack.

To form a word, drag the letters on the grid, although this is usually necessary for just the first few letters of a word because once the game identifies the direction of your move, all you need to do is tap the remaining letters and they will automatically be included in the word you are forming. To submit your word, tap the play button. If you can’t seem to find a word to form, you can either swap or pass. You can swap all of your tiles if you wish. Whether you swap or pass, a prompt will appear asking you if you’re sure about your decision or if you would like to cancel it. You can also check the validity of a word before playing it by doing a dictionary search. In addition, the remaining tiles of the game including their amount can be viewed, so you can make strategic moves. The game ends when one player uses up all of his or her tiles and the one with the higher score wins. A game will also end if both players pass twice in a row. Scoring Each letter tile has a corresponding point value which can be seen on the actual tile and the values range from 1 to 12 points. The total value of a word is determined by getting the sum of the letters’ point values.

Although longer words are helpful, sometimes, short but strategically formed words can also yield big points. There are special coloured squares on the board that can significantly increase your score especially when letters with high point values are placed on them. These either double or triple your word or letter score. The letters Q and Z are worth 12 points each, so if you are able to place them on a triple letter square, their value alone becomes 36 points! When a game ends, you can earn additional points if you win against your opponent because the sum of his or her remaining tiles will be added to your total score. Lexulous is a game that can greatly improve your Lexicon and its letter tiles have higher values compared to other word games. Not many word games can be played online and offline, and that makes this game more appealing. It also has plenty of options as to who your opponent will be, including yourself! Facebook Application Scrabulous Suspended : NPR Facebook Application Scrabulous Suspended Embed Embed Embed Embed Email July 29, 20084:00 PM ET The popular Facebook application Scrabulous has been suspended for users in the U.S.

and Canada after threats of legal action from Hasbro, the makers of Scrabble . Stefan Fatsis, of The Wall Street Journal, says the move is a short-term disaster for Hasbro. MICHELE NORRIS, Host: People who signed into Facebook today looking for their daily fix of Scrabulous received a curt message instead: Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. Well, can you spell bummer? Scrabulous is the most popular online version of the game Scrabble, and its disappearance was the most drastic development in a legal battle over the popular word game. Joining us to talk about that and some offline Scrabble is our own Stefan Fatsis. He's the author of the book "Word Freak," about the subculture of competitive Scrabble. Stefan, it's good to talk to you on this Tuesday. STEFAN FATSIS: Good to talk to you too, Michele. NORRIS: So you have the inventors of Scrabulous on one side, and on the other, the owners of the actual board game, the big toy company, Hasbro. Could you give us a quick background on this dispute?

FATSIS: Sure. The Scrabulous software was created a couple of years ago by a couple of brothers in India, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, and it took off when it was added as a Facebook application on the social networking site. And they claimed to have a couple of million registered users and more than half a million regular players in North America. But Hasbro says that this software violates the company's intellectual property, they threatened legal action a few months ago. And then last week, Hasbro sued the brothers in New York over what it called a clear and blatant infringement of its intellectual property. This all is reasonable by this company, Hasbro has to defend itself in the marketplace against copycats, though it's not an open-and-shut legal case. NORRIS: Stefan, one question: Why didn't Hasbro just buy Scrabulous outright and keep the game's fan base, which I understand is quite large? FATSIS: Well, apparently, there were some negotiations among the lawyers for Electronic Arts, which licenses Hasbro's games online, and the brothers and their lawyers.

Now, Hasbro says it never wanted a partnership though, it rather wanted to develop its own Scrabble online application, which Electronic Arts has been doing. They want Scrabble to be consistent across platforms. Hasbro executives compare what's going on here with what happened in the music industry a few years ago when they cracked down on online sharing of songs. The question, though, is whether Electronic Arts was ready to roll out their version of Scrabble, a Beta version of Scrabble on Facebook, before the company took this action and, essentially, forced Facebook to take Scrabulous down today. NORRIS: So is it possible the company might be alienating core fans of the game? Is this possibly a bad PR move for Hasbro? FATSIS: Well, judging from the initial reaction, it could be a short-term disaster for the company. Whether Scrabulous is legal or not, it was a terrific and is a terrific application, it's brought tens of thousands of people to the game that wouldn't normally be playing and including a lot of young people. Scrabulous fans are creating groups online with names like We Hate Hasbro's Scrabble.

There's the Save Scrabulous group that was formed when the threat of a shutdown emerged, it's got more than 46,000 members. And then today, while they were shutting down Scrabulous, the Beta version of Scrabble that Hasbro and Electronic Arts are promoting on Facebook crashed. NORRIS: Well, let's turn to people who play Scrabble, the old-fashioned way, on the board. I understand there's a National Scrabble Championship wrapping up today. FATSIS: Yes, it has wrapped up now. More 660 players got together for four days and they played 28 games at the National Scrabble Championship in Orlando, and we have a winner. And his name is Nigel Richards, he is a security engineer from New Zealand, he lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He beat in the final deciding game an options trader from Chicago and a former national and world Scrabble champion named Brian Cappelletto. This was one of the most incredible Scrabble games of all time, and I say that without too much hyperbole. These guys were tied at 370 and there were no tiles left in the bag. To give you an idea of how many words they know.

Brian played these words: serrying, S-E-R-R-Y-I-N-G; sarcine, S-A-R-C-I-N-E. Nigel played: innerve, I-N- N-E-R-V-E, and penates, P-E-N-A-T-E-S. And what you could call the winning word, the decisive word was: S-H-U-L-N, shuln, which is the plural of shul or synagogue. NORRIS: Stefan, now, before we send our listeners running for the dictionaries, let me just ask you quickly about the standup teenagers in this tournament. FATSIS: Well, there are six divisions at the National Scrabble Championship based on players' abilities. Four of them were won by players 19 years old or younger. One of the winners in the six and bottom division was Bradley Robins of Windham, New Hampshire, he's 11 years old. NORRIS: Eleven? FATSIS: Eleven. Like, cute as a button. And then he won 24 out of 28 Scrabble games against adults four and fives his age.

He played a nine-letter word in one game - retaining - through I-N that was already on the board. NORRIS: Impressive. Thank you, Stefan. FATSIS: Thanks, Michele. NORRIS: Stefan Fatsis normally talks with us on Fridays about sports and the business of sports. And he doesn't only write about Scrabble, his new book is "A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL." MELISSA BLOCK, Host: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Copyright © 2008 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc. , an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Question: Formerly called ‘Scrabulous’, what is the name of the online word game based on Scrabble?
Answer: Lexulous