Hasbro decided that enough’s enough, and will take up the mantle to sue creators of Scrabulous, a knock-off of their hugely popular word game, Scrabble. It seems as though the online game has infringed on the Scrabble North-American rights which falls under the wings of Hasbro after acquiring the assets of bankrupt company Coleco. In addition, since Scrabulous is available on Facebook, Hasbro has also pleasantly informed the social networking site to block the Scrabulous online game that has a pretty impressive following, attracting up to 500,000 users per day. I find this to be a rather disconcerting piece of news since Scrabulous is not new, having been around since 2006. This could be due to the fact that Hasbro is trying to push its way around after being snubbed by Facebook users who preferred Scrabulous despite the fact that an Electronic Arts and Hasbro collaboration have yielded an official online Scrabble game.

The lawsuit has already been filed in U.S. District Court in New York against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two brothers in Calcutta, India, who are the brainchild behind the game Scrabulous. Their company, RJ Softwares, also fall under the purview of the lawsuit since the name and game share some very close similarities to Scrabble. It makes me wonder why other older boardgames that are cheap knockoffs of Scrabble did not get a threatening letter from Hasbro - perhaps those aren’t large enough to cause a significant dent in Hasbro’s pockets?

To sum it all up, Hasbro is seeking damages, legal costs, and the elimination of the online game from Facebook. How many of our dear readers are Facebook users who spend quite a number of time on Scrabulous each day? How do you view this lawsuit – is it out of spite? What will you keep yourself occupied with should Scrabulous actually be taken off Facebook?

Source: eFluxMedia