The legal battle between Scrabble owners and Scrabulous has begun! Hasbro, who hold the intellectual property of the game in North America, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Scrabulous’ creators, Calcutta-based entrepreneurs Rajat and Jayant Agrawalla, for copyright infringement.

In addition to that, Hasbro also demanded Facebook to remove the application from their website, for violating copyrights. Facebook has made no move so far to shut down the application that made millions of people become addicted to it.

Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, said in a statement that they view the Scrabulous application as “clear and blatant infringement” of their Scrabble intellectual property, and that they are pursuing the legal action in the interest of their shareholders and to protect the integrity of the Scrabble brand.

According to PC Magazine, Facebook responded in an e-mail, saying: “We’re disappointed Hasbro has sought to draw us into their dispute; nevertheless, we have forwarded their concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response.”

Scrabulous quickly managed to become popular among millions of Facebook users, but this didn’t stop toy makers and rightful owners of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, to express their discontent regarding the online application of the popular game.

An attempt earlier this year to remove Scrabulous from the social networking site motivated thousands of people to create an online movement called “Save Scrabulous,” asking Scrabble owners to allow the application to continue on Facebook.

Some of the players addicted to Scrabulous even said that if it hadn’t been for the online game, they wouldn’t have bought the original game either.

But as efforts to bring Scrabulous down continued, Hasbro revealed earlier this month the launch of a new Scrabble application for Facebook, created in collaboration with EA, intended to take users’ minds of a non-legit application, and try the real deal.

An estimated 500,000 users play Scrabulous every day, and while Facebook is keeping a neutral position, users continue to express their disapproval with the toy maker’s demands to remove the application.