On tomorrow’s show, we have a little story on the popularity of Scrabulous, (one of the creators, Jayant Agarwalla, was in town, so it seemed like a good opportunity to chat). We also take a look at some of the trademark issues between the online game and Hasbro and Mattel, which own the rights to Scrabble. As you may know, back in January, Hasbro and Mattel requested that Facebook remove the very popular Scrabulous app from their site.
A new wrinkle that we didn’t have space to get into on the radio show/podcast, is that today, RealNetworks launched Scrabble By Mattel for Facebook, as The Guardian reports here. Because of the various rights issues, though, the new competitor to Scrabulous is only supposed to be available to players outside North America. When I spoke to Jayant Agarwalla on March 28th, he told me that “we are in talks with them…and we are working closely for an amicable resolution.” So we’ll wait and see how things turn out.
This once again dates back to the damn limitations of US channels banning us Canadians from viewing their content. I think it might be time to put up our borders soon. This whole Canada can’t have that, Canada can’t have this is rdiculous. But yet we’re supposed to like their channels, and watch them , but we’re given limited access to the sites. It’s getting beyound ‘silly’. The thing that jars is that other countires ar eable to get access to these sites no probl;em, but yet our next door neighbour won’t allow us to do so?