The legal battle over the Facebook game Scrabulous took a new turn in October after a court in New Delhi ruled that the Scrabble game itself is not protected by copyright.
Under the Delhi High Court ruling, the Agarwala brothers can continue to make the game but must change the name so that it does not in any way resemble Scrabble, intellectual property blog Spicy IP reported.
Earlier this year, toy giant Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside the US, took Rajat and Jayant Agarwala and their operating company RJ Software to court over Scrabulous, a popular game on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook has since blocked access to the game.
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The Delhi court did not accept the Agarwalas’ argument that the term “scrabble”, which was a word before it was a game name, was generic and therefore could not be protected by trade mark law. In its ruling, however, the court said that Mattel could not claim copyright of the game itself. The idea behind the game cannot be protected, it said, because copyright does not protect ideas, and the board could not be protected because it was not original. No application for the protection of design rights on the board had been applied for, the court found. Indian copyright law does not protect items that qualify for design protection but fail to apply for it once that item has been duplicated 50 times.
Lee Curtis, a trademark lawyer with Pinsent Masons, said on website Out-law.com that it was no surprise that the law had largely backed Mattel: “This decision from a legal point of view was probably inevitable. Scrabulous was obviously based on the well known brand name Scrabble and the public were initially attracted to the online game due to the similarity with Mattel’s board game.”
Curtis added, though, that companies in a position like Mattel’s face a strategic question about whether pursuing such cases actually advances the company’s aims. “Whether or not this is a Pyrrhic legal victory for Mattel, only time will tell,” he said. “Players of Scrabulous are already in open rebellion on the web. Sometimes bad PR often overwhelms a good legal case.”
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