Facebook Pulls Scrabulous Worldwide After Legal Complaints

While Hasbro owns the intellectual property rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, Mattel owns the IP rights in the rest of the world. Taking a page from Hasbro's book, the rival toy maker has approached Facebook and asked to have the application removed. Facebook, the popular social networking site, has, for the second time, buckled to the pressure and removed the application everywhere except in India.

Scrabulous remains active with Indian Facebook users because of an ongoing legal battle that is being waged in the courts there.

Scrabulous co-founder Jayant Agarwalla emailed a statement to the AP, deriding both Mattel and Facebook.

"Mattel itself had approached the Indian Courts in February 2008, seeking an order for taking down Scrabulous from Facebook and other servers," Agarwalla wrote. "The Hon'ble High Court has reserved judgment in this matter after hearing both parties. It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the Hon'ble High Court's decision. Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary."

But Agarwalla wasn't finished, and vented some of his anger directly at the social networking site.

"It is even more astonishing that Facebook, which claims to be a fair and neutral party, took this step even though they were fully aware of the circumstances under which the Mattel letter was sent to them," Agarwalla wrote.

Like Hasbro, Mattel also offers a version of Scrabble on Facebook for international users. Also like Hasbro's offering, Mattel's is nowhere near as popular as Scrabulous was.

Facebook users still loyal to the Agarwalla brothers' word game applications can play Wordscrapper. Unlike Scrabulous which looks nearly identical to Scrabble, Wordscrapper has round pieces and customizable rules that players can set before each game.

It's like deja vu all over again.