Many of you may have heard of the Facebook application called Scrabulous. The board and the rules are clearly a trademark violation of Hasbro’s U.S. rights and Mattel’s worldwide rights.
However, Scrabulous was trademarked last year by an Australian company entitled Imagination Holdings, which must have cut some sort of deal with the Agarwalla brothers. (Btw, here’s Jayant Agarwalla’s page on AllExperts.com where he offers expert advice on Scrabble. It’s not known if his knowledge applies to intellectual property law though.)
It appears that they are attempting to have the Scrabulous name refer to all sorts of electronic and online gaming. An interesting strategy and we’ll just have to wait and see how it all plays out.
It should be noted that the: Current Status: A non-final action has been mailed. This is a letter from the examining attorney requesting additional information and/or making an initial refusal. However, no final determination as to the registrability of the mark has been made.
For those who enjoy “Intellectual Property” history, here are the 1948 and 2007 trademark filings of the two competing factions from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: (The 1947 one is by the original maker of Scrabble before Selchow and Righter ,and then later, Hasbro obtained the rights.
