Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

It looks like Facebook is on with news and this time for its users who enjoy playing one of the most loved games that Facebook offers; Scrabulous. The next time users try to access the application they will get to see 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.

The reason being that Hasbro; that owns the right to scrabble in the United States accused Scrabulous’ creators, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla of violating the rights they have over Scrabble (as reported by  Vindu Goel). Hasbro that owns Scrabble rights in the United States had also asked Facebook to bring down the game from its platform as it’s a violation of the copyright law under the DMC act.

There wasn’t much on part of the Facebook until a spokesman; David Swain announced Facebook had issued a noticed for the take down of Scrabulous form the social network saying:

They decided in the middle of the night to disable the application in the U.S. and Canada.

The game would however be available for all those users of Facebook outside North America. He also mentioned that Facebook prefers to stay neutral about the matter as it’s a dispute between Scrabulous and Hasbro alone. Plus the decision to take it down was made by the developers of the game and Facebook simply followed what it had been asked to (this is for the complete removal of the service in the North American region).

Plus another interesting aspect here is that the copyright violation act came up right after Hasbro launched its own Facebook version for the famous game. So is this all up to remove all possible threats of competition and using the copyright stuff to eliminate it completely.