August 27, 2008, 11:38 AM — Scrabulous, the controversial third-party Facebook app, has once again been removed from the social networking site.
Use of the app, which is based on the board game Scrabble, had been suspended earlier this month in the U.S. and Canada after Hasbro, the makers of the game, sued the developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla citing copyright and trademark infringement.
Now Mattel, which holds the right to the board game in other areas of the world, has also started legal proceedings against the pair, forcing Facebook to ban the app in every country apart from India.
Hasbro and Mattel launched their own official Scrabble app on Facebook but it has only 70,000 active users, just 10 percent of the number of Scrabulous users at its peak.
The Agarwalla brothers renamed their app Wordscrapper and tweaked it so users could design their own boards, in a bid to avoid legal proceedings.
Jayant Agarwalla said: "It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the decision [of the Indian courts]. Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary."
