The toy company Hasbro Inc. which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America won the match against the unauthorized online version played by millions of Facebook members every day. The on-line game was shut down at least for the Canadian and the U.S. users. Mattel Inc., which owns the international rights to Scrabble, had filed a similar lawsuit in India.

Hasbro sued brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla in federal court in New York. On Tuesday, the brothers stated that they had decided to bar access "in deference to Facebook's concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights."

If you try to access the popular game, you get the following message: “Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.’" If you click you’ll get a form from the Indian creators of Scrabulous in which they ask for your email address so that you can be informed if anything new occurs.  

Hasbro began asking both Facebook and the Agarwallas for Scrabulous to be shut down seven months ago but they received no answer. The application remained up until Hasbro decided to sue.

Scrabulous had half a million active players daily on Facebook. It was released in July 2006 and it had up to 5 million players a month. North American members are encouraged to try out the newly released official Facebook version of Scrabble created by Electronic Arts for Hasbro.