Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous
January 17, 2008FaceBook asked to pull Scrabulous
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Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble. The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users.
Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.
The move has sparked protests by regular fans of Scrabulous keen to keep the add-on running.
Fan protests
Scrabulous is currently one of Facebook’s ten most popular applications - little programs that Facebook members can add to the profiles they maintain on the site.
The request to remove the add-on came from both Hasbro and Mattel because ownership of the Scrabble trademark is split between the two. Hasbro owns rights to the game in the US and Canada while Mattel has rights everywhere else in the world.
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FROM THE DOT.LIFE BLOG
  …the early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, “do no evil” kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing.  Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology correspondent
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Facebook told the PA newswire that it had no comment to make at this stage.
The Scrabulous add-on was not created by Facebook but was built for the site by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla - software developers based in Kolkata.
According to the Scrabulous website it has 594,924 daily active users - about a quarter of the total that have signed up to play it.
The game has spawned a host of “scrabble cheat” sites which work out every possible word that can be made from the available letters.
