Lexulous

History

The Scrabulous company was founded by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, both commerce graduates of St. Xavier's College, Kolkata, India. The Scrabulous website was created at the end of 2005, after the Agarwalla brothers, Rajat and Jayant, who had won numerous Scrabble tournaments, felt the need for a free gaming site where the popular game could be played. It was initially made available as "BingoBinge", with the site moving to Scrabulous on 5 July 2006.

In 2006 the website had 20,000 registered users, but after the developers made an application for the popular social networking website Facebook it had been added to 840,000 user pages, with more than 500,000 users daily, giving it "the most active users of any game that can be played over Facebook".

Legal and copyright issues

Scrabulous faced legal issues due to its resemblance to Scrabble along with a similar name. It also copied the board layout, rules, and at one stage the number of tiles. These issues forced the removal of the game from Facebook in mid-2008 and its eventual rebranding. The rights to Scrabble are currently owned within the US and Canada by Hasbro, and throughout the rest of the world by Mattel.

According to Anthony Falzone — head of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University — copyright laws do not allow someone to freely copy the particular expression of an idea. In his article in the Wall Street Journal, Jamin Brophy-Warren has said that Hasbro Inc. has refused to comment on legal matters, while the creators have mentioned informing the company about their site. The former Scrabulous website made several references to Scrabble, and previously provided a link to the rules of Scrabble and promoted itself as the best place to play Scrabble online.