Hasbro Inc. (HAS) is getting quite a bit of flack from every corner of the Internet for waging a legal battle against the popular Facebook knock-off of Scrabble called "Scrabulous." Much of the criticism is dead wrong.
Brothers Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla took something that did not belong to them, the intellectual property of the popular word game. The fact that it’s popular is irrelevant. If the Agarawalla brothers were able to get away with Scrabulous, than there would be nothing to stop people from stealing any content they wanted. I know people do that anyway but that does not make it right.
What do the fans of Scrabulous expect Hasbro to do – just sit there and watch a pirated version of one of their most popular products takes off? Should the toy company pay the brothers a fee for coming up with the game? That would be like hiring a burglar to protect you against being robbed no?
Hasbro, like any sane company, needs to protect its intellectual property. Shareholders would roast management alive if they did nothing about Scrabulous. Maybe some sort of compromise can be worked out with the Agarawallas, particularly if Scrabulous is as great as the media reports say it is.
The bulk of the profits for the games, though, should belong to Hasbro. People should not be rewarded for illegal conduct.
Jonathan Berr
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