14 DAY TRIAL // A while back, we reported on the conflict between the two Indian brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who created Scrabulous, probably people's favorite application on Facebook, and the company that owned the North American copyrights for the board game Scrabble. Following a legal complaint from Hasbro, Facebook was forced to restrict access to Scrabulous for US and Canadian users.
Consequently, non-American subscribers to the services offered by the social network thought that they could breathe easy. But that would not last too long. Almost a month after the crosswords game was removed, it has also been taken down almost on a global scale. "As a result of a complaint filed by Mattel, the copyright and trademark holder of Scrabble everywhere outside the U.S. and Canada, against the developers of Scrabulous, Facebook has restricted access to Scrabulous to users in all countries except India." says a Facebook official release.
India, which is the country of origin of the two creators of the game, is the only place where it is still available, because of the copyrights infringement lawsuit filed by Mattel against the Agarwallas. Since the trial is now in full swing, measures to have it removed here too will be taken only if judges decide that way.
It is known that Scrabulous generated a genuine play-mania, some of the users crediting it for preserving their relationships with their friends from abroad. Although a slightly different version of Scrabulous, namely Wordscraper, coming from the same authors, is still available on Facebook and despite the fact that the Indian brothers created a whole new website to host Scrabulous, people are exasperated by the decision.
"If Hasbro thinks that a computer game is going to affect sales to a scrabble board game please give me strength. Scrabulous is a different concept. I still play the board game even though mine is 25 years old, so I am not going to buy another one." says one user.