VentureBeat

Toymaker Hasbro has waved the white truce flag and dropped the lawsuit against RJ Softwares, the company behind the Facebook application Scrabulous, according to Reuters.

In July, Hasbro asked Facebook to yank the application due to copyright and intellectual property infringement. The rules, the tiles and the board for Scrabulous all looked the same as Scrabble, but under a different name. Hasbro then launched its own application, Scrabble Beta, with Electronic Arts, to hisses and boos, because it was so glitchy.

Scrabulous was removed, tweaked and resurfaced as a game called Wordscraper, which was decidedly not as popular as the original. The developers, brothers Rajat and Jayant Argarwalla, also changed their website from Scrabulous to Lexulous.com.

The court documents did not specify a reason for the lawsuit being dropped. As for Hasbro, the company has gotten what it wants — more growth and traffic than the-application-formerly-known-as-Scrabulous. AllFacebook.com has a great graph of how Wordscraper’s growth has flattened while Hasbro’s application traffic has grown.

Perhaps Hasbro is also backing off because of the major backlash against the company from avid Scrabulous fans, who created numerous “Save Scrabulous” Facebook groups and wrote negative reviews of Hasbro’s official Scrabble Beta application, among other methods of protest. As of today, Scrabble Beta has a whopping 1.3 out of 5 star rating based on 581 reviews. But more likely, Hasbro is happy to avoid drawn-out and expensive litigation. Because lawsuits are F-U-N.

And if you’re hard-pressed to find a holiday present for the Scrabble lovers in your life, try a pair of earrings made from — what else — Scrabble tiles. But don’t walk around Hasbro headquarters wearing them.

Hasbro dropped the long-expected hammer on Scrabulous today. The company sued the creators of the popular Facebook Scrabble knock-off, alleging copyright infringement.

The toy maker, which owns the Scrabble board game brand in the U.S. and Canada, also asked Facebook to take down the popular application under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Mark Blecher, a general manager at Hasbro’s game division, said in a phone call that Hasbro waited until Electronic Arts had a version of EA Scrabble ready for fans to play. (Hasbro owns the rights and has contracted with EA to make video games based on Hasbro properties). EA launched the beta version of its game last week and expects to have a final version soon. Blecher said that Hasbro began talks with Facebook earlier this year about the infringement but deferred its lawsuit because so many fans wanted a game to play. As long as EA Scrabble wasn’t ready, Scrabulous was the only choice on Facebook. Mattel owns the international rights to Scrabble and Real Networks has the rights to make an international video game based on Mattel’s international rights.

Scrabulous was created by two brothers in India, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, also names RJ Softwares. Scrabulous took off because it was an easy way for friends to stay in touch and socialize via Facebook. Players could play the game asynchronously, one turn at a time, so that it didn’t matter if the other player was online or not. Fans were ready to revolt when they heard that Scrabulous might be taken down. But Blecher said he expects fans to migrate to the EA version.

Right now, Scrabulous ranks 11th on the list of most active Facebook applications. The game has 512,961 active daily users and 3.9 million installs, according to Adonomics. Daily users is actually down from the peak, Adonomics shows.