Scrabulous Returns to Facebook as Wordscraper

It’s back! Scrabulous, the impostor Scrabble game on Facebook which was shut down after a lawsuit filed by Hasbro, which owns the U.S. and Canadian rights to the original Scrabble board game, came back to life Thursday as Wordscraper.

Its return follows a drawn-out battle between the copyright holder, gamers and developers.

The popular Scrabulous, created by Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, had a following of nearly 80,000 players since 2005. For months Hasbro warned Facebook and the Agarwallas about copyright infringement, and last week it sued the Agarwallas in the Southern District Court of New York and demanded that the game be shut down. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, while rival toymaker Mattel owns the rights in the rest of the world.

The creators complied and posted this message to fans on the Scrabulous Web site: “In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in the USA and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice.”

Users in the Middle

Hasbro did not want to leave users hanging so, thanks to a licensing deal with game maker Electric Arts, an approved version of Scrabble was added to Facebook for users in the U.S. and Canada. Hasbro said the game was the first Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social-networking site and added that others are in development. Scrabulous fans rebelled by boycotting Scrabble.

Scrabble did not last long. It’s not clear what happened, but Scrabble went down on Wednesday, leaving users wondering if the beta application had problems or if angry hackers had attacked the application.

Facebook apologized for the inconvenience and the application was back on Thursday. Facebook said the finished version will be launched in mid-August.

The Same, Yet Different

The Agarwallas said they contacted Hasbro…