Scrabble v. Scrabulous redux

There are many examples of what I wrote about yesterday — lawyers prosecuting a lawsuit on behalf of a client who in fact would be better off not suing even though his claim might be a legitimate one — but there are few better than the one I wrote about here in November: Hasbro’s lawsuit against the creators on Facebook of Scrabulous, brought because, in the words of Hasbro’s lawyer, “Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties.”  As Eric Eldon wrote yesterday in Venture Beat, “Hasbro owns the Scrabble copyright for the U.S. and Canada and forced Scrabulous to go offline in those countries at the end of July; Mattel owns the rights to Scrabble everywhere else and followed in Hasbro’s footsteps a month later.”  The problem is that now Hasbro’s product on Facebook and the product newly produced by the creators of Scrabulous are splitting a smaller audience on Facebook than Scrabulous alone had on Facebook even as Facebook’s participation climbs precipitiously.  Eldon suggests it would’ve been much wiser for Hasbro and Mattel to have entered into a partnership with the creators of Scrabulous to produce a Facebook-based Scrabble game.  Instead, the lawyers took over, and everyone is worse off:

This is exactly how not to build a Facebook app. Facebook is designed to help people share information with those they care about – geography-based licenses from another era have just gotten in the way of making something people want to use.