Playing the word "endgame" on a triple word score used to net North American Scrabulous players a nice score, but today the popular Facebook application finds itself in check-mate. Last week, Hasbro, who owns the North American
copyright to Scrabble, took legal action against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the Indian brothers who created the application, and social
networking site Facebook.
The toy manufacturer filed a lawsuit in Southern District of New York court last week, claiming that the application infringed on its intellectual property. A message was also sent to Facebook requesting that the application be removed from U.S. and Canadian versions of the social network.
Today, when hopeful players tried to take their turns they were greeted with a simple message: "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here."
Facebook has confirmed that Scrabulous has been removed from the site due to the action Hasbro took. "In response to a legal request from Hasbro, the copyright and trademark holder for Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, the developers of Scrabulous have suspended their application in the U.S. and Canada until further notice," the company said in a statement.
Hasbro has launched its own Scrabble application on Facebook to compete with the Agarwalla brother's offering. Currently, EA's Scrabble Beta, which is five days old, currently boasts 14,956 users daily -- nowhere nearly the approximately 500,000 daily Scrabulous players.
With Scrabulous being shut down, Hasbro expects its application to become more popular.
