Hasbro, the company that owns the intellectual property over Scrabble for North America, has announced that it has filed suit against the creators of the Scrabulous online game that millions of Facebook users play each month. The company also announced that it has asked Facebook to take the game off its website.

Facebook refused to do so, and said that over the last year it has tried to make the two parts reach an agreement, apparently without any success. According to the BBC News, an official company statement says that “Over the past year, Facebook has tried to use its status as neutral platform provider to help the parties come to an amicable agreement” and that "We're disappointed that Hasbro has sought to draw us into their dispute."

The company that creates Scrabulous is called RJ Softwares and is based in India. Besides it, Hasbro has filled suit against its owners, brothers Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla.

Scrabulous is one of the most popular games on Facebook, which makes it a rather important source of income for the social networking site. This is most certainly one of the reasons for which Facebook hasn't rushed to take it off the site when asked to do so.

Hasbro previously contracted Electronic Arts to turn the traditional games whose intellectual property  the company owns in online games that can be placed on social networking sites. A beta version of Scrable has been already made available on Facebook, but its popularity is far smaller than Scrabulous' one.