Scrabulous Bows To Pressure, Shuts Down Facebook App In North America

Attempt to play Scrabulous from the United States or Canada today and you will be greeted with the following: "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." Doing so directs you to a form asking for your e-mail address so that the Scrabulous team can keep you updated on news as it develops. The move apparently was made by the development team and not by Facebook who is trying play Switzerland and remain neutral in the fight. In this NY Times Bits blog posting David Swain, a Facebook spokesman, is quoted as saying “They decided in the middle of the night to disable the application in the U.S. and Canada.” A commentors on the post is asking the same question we've all been asking "Why does’t Hasbro get with the program, have the lawyers work out the details, and collaborate with the creators of Scrabulous?" Oh, I'm sure it's not that simple but come on guys can't we all play nice?

Hasbro Launches Lawsuit Against Scrabulous Developers

This story has been dragging on for a while now, but Hasbro has finally launched a lawsuit against brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla the makers of Scrabulous. “Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Hasbro’s general counsel Barry Nagler, in a statement. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.” Interestingly the suit comes only after the launch of a beta version of an official Scrabble game which leads to the question did Hasbro try to do a deal with the Agarwalla brothers or did they wait until their own online version of the game was complete before taking real action? Either way Hasbro's version has a lot of catching up to do with nearly 9,000 active Facebook players Thursday while Scrabulous had over 500,000. More from the LA Times here, and the New York Times here.

Facebook Asked to Remove Scrabulous

From the "I can't believe it's taken them this long" department comes the news that Hasbro and Mattel have reportedly asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous, an obvious rip-off of the popular boardgame, from its application directory. Scrabulous has a large following and, in true Facebook fashion, "Save Scrabulous"Facebook groups have been established in a effort to save the game. The largest having more than 30,000 members! According to Cnet, both sides of the debate are being tight lipped, so you can be sure that the lawyers are being kept busy. Why don't Hasbro / Mattel just buy out the company and take the half million users? I suppose that might set an ugly precedent...