I simply found this story to be too humorous to not post something about it. In the world of board games, scratch that let’s say in the world of word games what must be one of the top 2 word games that could possibly pop into your head. Scrabble right? Scrabble has got to be one of the most popular board games on the planet with out a doubt no question right? OK good.
The online free gaming scene is quite large on the Internet with online versions of all the board games out there in some form or another. Now if you love a word game like scrabble and you look and look for it online at all the gaming sites and you can’t find it what would you do? Well here’s what two brothers did they decided on their own to how shall we put this oh I know they COPIED the board game almost to be identical from the tiles to the colors on the board to be the exact same thing as Scrabble the board game only they decided to call it Scrabulous. Scrabble and Scrabulous think anyone will notice that they copied a board game that is 70 years old sold in 120 countries in 29 different languages! Do you think anyone will notice?? Hahahahahahahaah…….
Guess who noticed? That’s right only the company that owns the rights to the game itself Hasbro which is Mattel in the global market. Hellooooo don’t you think that a major company like Mattel would notice if you were copying their trademarked copyrighted game? Of course they would and of course they did. The ultimate downfall of the brothers wild ride came when their version of the game became popular on Facebook. The brothers did decide to eventually pull their game from the market albeit a little too late. The big corporate machine called Mattel and it’s lawyers are hard at work now with lawsuits.
Perhaps learning from their mistake or just plain daring enough to try again they have released a new word game called Wordscraper which uses round tiles, you can choose where you earn extra points and there is a quadruple bonus score available. Ooooooohhhhh what an original idea! So what do you think is it just me or is it obvious that properties that are owned by corporations and pretty much known around the world are probably not a good choice to be copying their product and calling it your own.
