Over the last week, Hasbro and Mattel, joint owners of the rights to board game Scrabble, have been calling for Facebook to remove the Scrabulous application from its network. The cease and desist letters have demanded that Scrabulous be removed by tonight. If Hasbro wins, will gaming sites like Zynga be on the hit list?

The saga of Scrabulous has been a long and drawn out one. From the moment Hasbro decided the third party app infringed its rights, both in name and game play style, there has been a flurry of behind the scenes activity.

Techcrunch is now reporting that time is up, and tonight is the last chance for the makers of Scrabulous to save their game from total annihilation from the big boys.

Scrabulous is hugely popular on the Facebook social network, averaging 602,233 users daily and 2.3 million active users from the moment it went live. This latest round of Hasbro trying to inflict their muscle, has even prompted over 46,000 Facebook users to join a group on the site called “Save Scrabulous”.

So what’s likely to happen from now on? Well, there have reportedly been a lot of behind the scenes deal making happening over the last few days between all three parties involved, as well as Electronic Arts, who hold the US license for the online version of the game, to try and come to a reasonable agreement.

Hasbro wants the makers of Scrabulous to sell the game to EA for a good chunk of money, and if it doesn’t comply, is ordering it be shut down completely. The Scrabulous developers themselves have been hawking the game to other interested parties, though it seems the obviously dodgy legal matters are scaring anyone away from actually putting their hands in their pockets.

So it seems that over the next few days, either Scrabulous will become an EA property, or the thousands of Facebook users who enjoy the game will be saying bye bye for good.

Meanwhile, there is speculation coming from industry sources that the saga will not end at Scrabulous. Instead, Hasbro may now go after some other gaming sites and applications which it sees as abusing its copyrights.

As well as including other Facebook apps, this may include sites such as Zynga, the recently launched start-up from Mark Pincus. Techcrunch claims that the site has games “that are based on Risk (Attack!), Boggle (Scramble), and Battleship (Battleship)”.

Attack! is thought to have 1.4 million players online, and guess what, Risk, as well as Scramble, and Battleship are all owned by… yep, you guessed it, Hasbro.

I can’t see a deal being done, at least not in time to save the application from disappearing off of Facebook. The bigger question is, how sensible a decision is it from Hasbro to alienate the millions of fans who play these games online, and could potentially then buy the real thing from a store, and make them huge profits in to the bargain?

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 9:21 pm under Internet, Legal.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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