MillionFace

Creators of the popular Scrabble knockoff, Scrabulous, had to S-U-S-P-E-N-D the word game on Facebook in the United States and Canada. Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla suspended the game after being hit with a lawsuit, disappointing wordsmiths who have spent hours playing the game on Facebook.

Hasbro Inc., the company that owns the North American rights to the word game, last week sued Rajat and Jayant  in Calcutta, India, who created the Scrabulous program. Separately, Hasbro asked Facebook to block the program, something the site resisted despite risks of losing immunity protection from copyright lawsuits.

Facebook says the Agarwalla brothers, not the company, made the decision.

Earlier this year Video game maker Electronic Arts Inc. “released an official version for American and Canadian Facebook users under a licensing deal with Hasbro. But the authorized Scrabble has been attracting only 15,000 daily users, compared with some half-million for Scrabulous.” That authorized version is actually still in a “beta” test mode, and encountered technical problems Tuesday.

Facebook users who tried to access Scrabulous on Tuesday were simply told the game was disabled “until further notice,” and many Facebook users updated their one-line status messages on the site to mourn the suspension.

The game continues to work at the developers’ Web site, Scrabulous.com, but users must sign up and start games afresh.

What a shame, Hasbro could have at least let Facebook users play the game (Scrabulous) until they got their game perfected. It came up today, but kept crashing, and now it seems to be completely down.