Scrab-u-lose!

Toy giants Hasbro, makers of the board game Scrabble, have written to the owners of Facebook asking that they remove the application Scrabulous from their website.

Scrabulous which is apparently one of the ten most popular Facebook applications attracts more than 500,000 users a day to the social networking site and appears to make litte effort to distinguish itself from Scrabble. It even provides a link to the Wikipedia definition of Scrabble from its rules page.  It's perhaps little wonder, then, that Hasbro accuses the makers of "gross copyright and trademark infringement" of Hasbro's rights in Scrabble.

The fact that Facebook has not immediately shut down the Scrabulous application has lead to suggestions that Hasbro may be willing to do a deal with the makers of Scrabulous.  This would certainly please the 13,000+ users who have signed up to the petition group 'Save Scrabulous' but may depend on the terms of the licensing deal Hasbro agreed with EA Casual in August 2007 which grants EA an exclusive worldwide to develop 'interactive experiences (of Hasbro's games) for a mass audience to play across key platforms including mobile, online, handheld, PC and Consoles'.  Any settlement involving a licence from Hasbro is likely to need EA's consent.