Hasbro Sues to Shut Down Scrabulous

Hasbro, publisher of the classic word game Scrabble, has filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court to force the creators of Scrabulous to take their game offline. Scrabulous is a very popular application for Facebook with gameplay identical to Scrabble. Hasbro recently teamed with Electronic Arts to make an official version available on Facebook. According to a New York Times article, Hasbro's general counsel said, "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."

Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America; Mattel owns the rights elsewhere in the world. According to an article at Time.com, Mattel has already filed suit against the brothers who created Scrabulous, Jayant and Rajat Agarwallas, in their home country of India.