Scrabulous reaches a not-so-fabulous end on Facebook

IDG News Service — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:47:57 -0700

The word "SUED" might fetch only four measly points on a Scrabble board but for the Agarwalla brothers of Kolkata, creators of 'Scrabulous', the highly addictive and popular Scrabble knock-off application on Facebook, it might just end up fetching a big court case.

The brothers, Rajat and Jayant, have already been served a legal notice by toymaker Mattel, that owns the rights to the original word-building game outside the United States. They have also approached Facebook and as a result the application has been blocked by the social networking site in almost all the countries that it services.

Mattel approached the Indian courts earlier this year and the case is still pending. As a result India is the only country where Facebook users can still access the application. In light of their legal troubles, the Agarwalla brothers have launched another word-building game 'Wordscraper' which uses circles instead of squares, has a marginally different scoring system and lets users design their own boards.

Before being unceremoniously dumped by Facebook, Scrabulous was being played by close to a million users with 500,000 daily users.