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1. Comment - Scrabulous returns to Facebook as 'Wordscraper' with circular board

   (Jul 31, 2008 - 4:56 PM)

   From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#History):
   
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   In 1938, architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out meticulously performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources including The New York Times. The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15-by-15 game board and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.[3]
   
   In 1948, James Brunot,[4] a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, (and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game) bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. Though he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the "premium" squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also changed the name of the game to "Scrabble"
   
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   Given that the game was co-opted 60 years ago with very minimal changes, shouldn't the much revised game now called Wordscraper be allowed to exist without legal action?