Fans of the wildly popular Scrabulous game on Facebook, which was created for those who like to play Scrabble online, may soon be unable to play Scrabulous, if toymaker Hasbro has their way. Scrabulous, which was invented and coded by Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, infringes on Hasbro’s copyright and trademark rights in that venerable crossword board game, Scrabble, says Hasbro. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble and Scrabble on line in both the US and Canada, and their position is if you want to play on line Scrabble, then play online Hasbro Scrabble, at one of the Internet Scrabble sites, not Scrabulous. Mattel owns the rights to Scrabble throughout the rest of the world. Both Hasbro and Mattel are involved in the action.
In cease and desist letters to four parties, Hasbro has demanded that Scrabulous be taken down. One of the four letters went to Facebook. While nobody has confirmed the other three, they are most likely to have been served on the Scrabulous stand-alone site, also created by the Agarwalla brothers (in fact about a year before they ported it to Facebook), and their Internet hosting providers (and perhaps Facebook’s as well).
With 600,000 active players, it may be true that Scrabulous stands to divert – maybe is already diverting – a significant chunk of change away from the authorized Scrabble sites.
The Agarwallas says that the reason they created Scrabulous was because they couldn’t find an online version of Scrabble that they liked, so they created their own.
Apparently a large portion of those 600,000 Scrabulous players feel the same way, as when news of the take down demands broke, they started a “Save Scrabulous” group on Facebook.
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Hasbro says that it is “not surprised that fans have thoroughly enjoyed playing Scrabulous on Facebook.com. What consumers may not realize, however, is that Scrabulous is an illegally copied online version of the world’s most popular word game.”
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