Scrabulous faces Hasbro action

Hasbro has filed an action for trademark and copyright infringement against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla concerning the game Scrabulous.

A document filed with the United States District Court - Southern District of New York and seen by Web User accuses the brothers of ripping off the board game Scrabble, which Hasbro co-owns the rights to.

Hasbro filed a cease-and-desist order against the Argawallas back in late 2007 and has persistently demanded that the owners of popular social network Facebook, where Scrabulous first came to prominence, remove the game from the site.

Hasbro, which shares rights to the game with Mattel, has asked for a jury trial and in its court filing alleges that Scrabulous "copies the essential and original elements" of Scrabble.

"There is no comprehensive statement of the rules of Scrabulous. A user not already familiar with the rules of the Scrabble crossword game would not know how to play Scrabulous," the document reads.

Hasbro also alleges that it has evidence that the Argawalla brothers used meta-tags such as "play Scrabble online" and "free online Scrabble" in their attempt to attract traffic to the application via search engines.

The Argawalla brothers declined to comment on the matter but told Web User that they would be issuing a statement in the next few days.

UPDATE 29/7/08: Players in the US and Canada are no longer able to access the Scrabulous application via Facebook.

A message on the website reads: "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice."

Scrabulous has now also issued a statement on the matter.

"Facebook has informed us that they have received a legal notice from Hasbro in reference to the Scrabulous application," the statement read.

"In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in USA and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice," the statement read.

Scrabulous also confirmed that Mattel, who co-owns the rights to Scrabble with Hasbro, is pursuing action in the Indian courts.

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