New York - American toy maker Hasbro sued two Indian programmers Thursday for launching an online copy of its Scrabble board game on the Facebook social networking site. The game has become one of the most popular pastimes on Facebook, attracting some half a million daily visitors in the year since Facebook began letting outside developers write Web programs for the site.
Hasbro's complaint came less than two weeks after an official version of Scrabble was launched on Facebook. The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in New York, named as defendants Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two brothers in Calcutta, India, who created the program, along with their Web design and technology company, RJ Software. The complaint charged that the game Scrabulous violates Hasbro's copyright.
"The Scrabulous site is a theft of intellectual property, and we can't allow that to continue," says Mark Blecher, Hasbro's general manager of digital media and gaming. "We expect that Facebook will take it down."
