A word from Scrabble owner: lawsuit

Hasbro Inc. made its move.

The owner of Scrabble filed suit Thursday against the developers of Scrabulous, a word game played by millions of Facebook users each month.

“We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property,” said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel.

Hasbro also sent a letter to Facebook asking the social networking site to shut down Scrabulous. As of noon Pacific time Thursday, the game was still up.

Filed in the Southern District of New York federal court, the suit against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla and their company, RJ Softwares, claims copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

This month Hasbro introduced a beta version of its official Scrabble game on Facebook. Developed by Electronic Arts Inc., the game is slated to be available to all Facebook members next month.

“We want to give Scrabble fans a legitimate way to play the game,” said Mark Blecher, Hasbro’s general manager of digital media and gaming.

So far players have ruled in favor of Scrabulous. Scrabble counted 8,862 active Facebook players Thursday, and Scrabulous had 512,961.

Blecher said the match hadn’t really begun, given that Scrabble was still in beta.