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• mike - Jan 17 2008 | facebook, scrabulous, scrabble, games, words, puzzles

  What kind of hutzpah do you have to have to release "Scrabulous" which is a direct rip-off of Scrabble (same tile distribution, same board layout, same dictionary).

  I don't know which of these components are are protected by copyright law - it seems reasonable to me that Scrabulous has violated not only copyright but also the trade mark of Hasbro.

  Hasbro cannot protect the "idea" of an anagramming word game. This is an opening to create a "open source game design". We just need a group to create the following components and license under an open source license:

  - Board design
  - Tile distribution
  - Word list
  - Scoring rules

  I recently did an analysis of the tile distribution of Scrabble as compared to a standard corpus of English words. I found these major differences. Of the 98 tiles in Scrabble, it has:

  - Too few H's (should have 6 instead of 2).
  - Too many I's (should have 7 instead of 9).
  - Too few S's (should have 6 instead of 4).
  - Too few T's (should have 9 instead of 6).

  • brad - Jan 17 2008
    

    I thought the name of the website was "Scaborous" which is more appropriate to my impression of their intent, I reckon. Even ignoring issues of "derivative works" you've got to change at least 5% to avoid getting dinged for literal infringement. Goofy.