Ode to Scrabulous

Apparently, the law has caught up to Scrabulous, the free, on-line version of Scrabble currently played by as many as 594,000 people every day on the social networking site Facebook and ranked number 15 on PC World's 100 Best Products of 2008.

Hasbro, who owns the copyright to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, filed a lawsuit against the creators of the game, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta, on July 24. This morning, American and Canadian visitors to Facebook expecting to play (yours truly included) found that their access had been blocked.

The story began in January of this year, when Hasbro approached Facebook and asked them to remove the application from the site. That strategy failed, since Scrabulous was neither developed nor owned by Facebook but merely placed there by the Agarwalla brothers like thousands of other applications posted to the site.

Scrabulous, like the millions of other applications floating around on the web, as something of an experiment. The only difference was its massive popularity. Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, remarked in January that the Agarwallas were making something like $25,000 a month off of advertising revenues, and this success, while a pittance in comparison to the value of Facebook itself, was enough to spark the attention and the ire of Hasbro. "The early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing," wrote Cellan-Jones.

But the Scrabulous-Scrabble fight is more than a David-vs. Goliath story. It's about old media and new media technologies, and the ability of companies with popular traditional brands to maintain or even extend those brands in new media. In a way, the Hasbro lawsuit misses an opportunity to find new fans, create new markets, and sell more products. Hasbro shouldn't be suing Scrabulous. It should be buying it.