Hasbro finally shuts Scrabulous down

Until today, I had two Scrabulous games going in Facebook: One where I was holding my own with three colleagues (after a disgraceful showing in the last game), and a second where I'm wiping the floor with a good-natured friend. But no longer -- Facebook has finally shut down its highly popular (and copyright violating) version of Scrabble.

It was only a matter of time. Hasbro has sued the the creators of Scrabulous -- Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla -- and their company, RJ Software, in New York federal court for copyright infringement.

I can certainly understand why Hasbro would challenge the Agarwalla's right to run their extremely popular version of Scrabble on Facebook. The company owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States fair and square (Mattel owns it elsewhere). In fact, I understand that nobody is really denying that Hasbro owns the copyright and that the Agarwallas don't really have the legal right to push an online version of the game. Scrabulous is Scrabble. No question about that.

The problem, up to now, has been that (a) Hasbro's beta version of Scrabble was rumored to be buggy, slow, and just not as good, and (b) Hasbro didn't want to pick up the negative publicity that would ensue should approximately half a million Scrabulous fans suddenly be denied their word fix. However, it looks like the company finally made its move.

Well, Hasbro's PR machine had better get working, because the negative publicity is coming fast and loud. Click on the Scrabulous link, and all you get is a notice that the game has been disabled for U.S. and Canada users "until further notice." There were dozens of news stories today, many featuring aggrieved game players complaining about their missing games.

Knowing very well that you can't go by rumors when you're judging a product, I decided to install the authorized version of Scrabble, invite a friend or two to join a game, and see if Hasbro's product was really not as good as Scrabulous. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible -- when I tried to view the application, all I got was a message that said that the company is making changes for its official launch in August, and that Scrabble would be available "as soon as possible."

Not what I wanted to see.

A word of advice to Hasbro -- if you plan to protect your copyright by shutting down a highly popular game, and want to avoid annoying a large population of possible customers, you might want to make sure that you have something to take its place first.