As I mentioned earlier this week in my review of Scrabulous, the app stood on shaky legal ground. Despite being undeniably fun (hey it’s Scrabble), the game is an exact clone of Hasbro’s classic board game right down to the amount of letters and board placement — everything is identical.

My concerns were confirmed today as Fortune reported that Hasbro has indeed filed suit against the brothers behind Scrabulous. Although it might seem a little silly (not really), consider this, Scrabulous currently has over 2.3 million registered users and generates 70 million pageviews per month. All that equates to about $25,000 in revenue each month.

While $25,000 a month is but a pittance to a company like Hasbro, it does have a strong claim here, Scrabulous is a blatant ripoff of its property. Nevertheless, I expect a settlement here. Legal proceedings will be a pointless effort and for what it spends it could probably just as easily buy Scrabulous — which makes a lot more sense.

At any rate, we’ll keep you posted on this one as it develops.

Technorati Tags: facebook, scrabble, scrabulous, facebook platform, hasbro, legal, social networking, communication, gaming

Share this on: