

Scrabulous highlights the failure of American Copyright Law  - wave
http://www.inquisitr.com/2010/scrabulous/

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ajross
It's more complicated than this, though. Copyright protects the direct
expression of a game, but not the rules themselves. You can't copyright the
way scrabble is played any more than you can copyright the game of "football"
under the laws governing "the NFL rulebook" (an actual document).

What seems to have happened is that they decided they just didn't want to
fight this, and I don't blame them. Ultimately though, it's not at all clear
that Hasbro would have won this as a copyright case. Note that at least one
other Hasbro property, the AD&D 1st edition rules, exists in a "free" form on
the web as "OSRIC", using rules compatible with the original but without any
of the copyrighted material. The Wikipedia page on the game talks about this
in more depth: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSRIC>

And to be clear: "Scrabulous" almost certainly _did_ have a trademark problem,
as it clearly evokes the name of the original game.

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evgen
> You can't copyright the way scrabble is played any more than you can
> copyright the game of "football" under the laws governing "the NFL rulebook"
> (an actual document).

As companies other than EA have discovered, you can use the non-copyrighted
rules to the game, but you can't use the NFL team names and logos in your
version. Scrabulous picked a name that was a trademark problem and copied the
board exactly to add a copyright problem to the mix.

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rudyfink
Created in 1938 and protected through 2063. One hundred and twenty five (125)
years of protection does seem like a bit much...

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DocSavage
Blame Mickey Mouse. An old analysis:
[http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.ht...](http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html)

