Scrabulous fans who were abruptly forced into withdrawal Tuesday, when Facebook capitulated to Hasbro's demands to clear the site of the Scrabble knock-off, have reason for optimism today. The
creators of Scrabulous, Indian brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, have launched a Facebook application, Wordscraper, that some users say is a good substitute.
With more than 500,000 daily
players, Scrabulous, launched in June 2007, was one of Facebook's most popular apps. Some observers also credited the online word game with renewing people's interest in the offline version of the
game.
But Hasbro didn't see the upside. In January, Hasbro began threatening the creators with trademark and copyright infringement suits -- then, last week, finally filed suit. The
company also demanded that Facebook remove the game, which happened Tuesday morning.
The copyright infringement claim is iffy, because it's not clear that board games like Scrabble can
even be copyrighted. But trademark infringement seemed stronger, given that
Scrabulous had a very similar look to Scrabble.
The new game, which uses circular tiles instead of square ones and has a different scoring system, might well get around the legal pitfalls
of Scrabulous.
Meantime, more than 3,500 Facebook users signed up for Wordscraper this morning alone. Hasbro also recently launched an official version of Scrabble for Facebook, which
debuted to mixed reviews, but has managed to garner more than 60,000 users.