Yesterday, one day after taking down Scrabuluos in the U.S. and Canada in response to a lawsuit from Hasbro, the Indian brothers behind Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, released a brand new crossword-like game on Facebook called Wordscraper. Th…

Hah! One in the eye to you yanks!

P.S. On a more constructive note Scrabulous is showing up this morning as having 304,044 daily active users, so Scrabble will still have a L O N G way to go to convince non-US/Canada users to switch to theirs.

I imagine most of us will be playing against non-US/Canada players, although those who play against US/Canada users will I guess add Scrabble (perhaps?) but continue with Scrabulous against opponents who also still have it available.

Some ppl of US are now using some british proxy to access scrabulous, which they will give up soon. And it would have been wise if scrabulous brothers themselves redirect traffic of scrabulous to wordscraper. Erick, i feel u giving undue importance to this.

Take that India, Bindia is gonna whoop your bhangra luvin ass!

Wordscraper will pass legal muster.

But unless they can leverage the audience they built on the back of the scrabble brand, wordscraper will go nowhere.

1. Alienating their customers is a good way to improve their products

2. Do not have ANY CLUE WHATSOEVER about the power of web 2.0, specifically in the way of collaboration.

They feel that great ideas will only come from employees and partners.

How many points do you get for the word “Deuchebags”?

We understand your passion for the SCRABBLE brand. In fact, we have been hard at work creating a variety of great new ways to enjoy SCRABBLE, from the classic board game, to playing in the digital space on the iPod, iPhone, pogo.com online game site, and now, social networking on Facebook.

Some people have asked us why we couldn’t coexist with Scrabulous, and compete head-to-head. In the toy and game business, we have many legitimate competitors, and we welcome healthy competition as our industry strives to provide the best entertainment value for consumers everywhere. Scrabulous did not represent legitimate competition. Scrabulous was an infringement, it was unlawful, and we took the necessary action, similar to what the recording industry did when kids were posting music to illegal sites and allowing their friends to copy the music for free.

As you know, Hasbro filed suit on July 24 to protect our intellectual property rights. However, in deference to SCRABBLE fans like you, we waited to take this action until we had an authentic alternative to offer players. We know that many of you are closely scrutinizing the new SCRABBLE application developed by Electronic Arts. Please note that this application remains in a beta stage on Facebook, and both EA and Hasbro are monitoring feedback from fans, which will help us as we continue to improve the experience leading up to the official launch scheduled for the first half of August.

In closing, we want you to know that SCRABBLE is a very important game and brand for Hasbro. We value the passion of our fans, and we promise that we will continue to innovate in providing the best SCRABBLE experiences possible

With that they could then ad quadruple letter, and quadruple words as kids love high scores. Scrabble does not have that. Leaving it up to the player to rearrange is pointless. Being an avid scrabble player since age 10 or so, I know the game and love it.

You can’t copyright the rules of a game, only the specific way they are expressed.

You can copyright the graphic design of a game board, for instance, like the word SCRABBLE running down the side, and the little triangles around the colored squares, but you can’t copyright the idea of putting colored squares on a grid and acting as double word scores. Cloning a game is not copyright infringement.

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