mike | Shared With: Everyone - Jan 22 2008 | facebook, scrabble, scrabulous, legal, web 2.0, social
mike | Shared With: Everyone - 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 rulesI 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).
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