If users try to access the application they will see this message."Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here."

If users click on the link they are taken to a page requesting them to sign up for email alerts about the status of Scrabulous.

Hasbro, the rights holder for Scrabble, sued the creators of Scrabulous last week and sent Facebook a DMCA take down notice. A Facebook spokesman forwarded the notice to Scrabulous. Creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla removed the application last night in the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook says it will not get involved in the Scrabulous Hasbro suite. It says it wants to remain a neutral platform.

"We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand," Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, said last week.

Hasbro licensee Electronic Arts launched its version of Scrabble on Facebook this month and it currently has over 14,000 daily users.

Hasbro says it will launch more of its games on social networking sites later this year.

Scrabble and Target Go Goofus

Scrabble finds out it has a huge following on Facebook through an application that “pays homage” to Scrabble. Tapping into this fan base would be a double-word score for the game’s owners Mattel and Hasbro. Hint: Send them all a coupon for the handheld game?! Instead, they’re calling in legal to piss off thousands of potential customers.

Target has tapped into the power of Facebook.This makes their recent blogger relations move all the more puzzling.

PRNewser tells us “a Target PR rep sent the following message to a blogger questioning a recent ad campaign:”

Thank you for contacting Target; unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest. Once again thank you for your interest, and have a nice day.

Target deals with non-traditional media outlets. They just don’t deal with the Z-Lister that reached out to them.

JCPenney Thinks Link, M&Ms Goes Green

JCPenney created what Ad Age calls “organic search equity” by aggregating blog content into a branded Fall Shopping Guide. As bloggers connected their readers to the content and people Stumble(d)Upon it, the Google Juice started flowing.

Now the site “shows up as No. 5 of 13 million results for the search term ‘fall shopping’ and second out of more than 4 million results for ‘fall shopping guide.’"

M&Ms cashed in on the urban myth equity around its green candy to stand out amongst a sea of red and pink packaging. The end result? Buzz.

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And they want it taken down.

Of course, Facebookers are plenty upset about that, and are rallying behind the game.

The app, according to BBC, pulls in 500,000 daily users, and has spawned Scrabulous cheat websites so players can consult an automatic word-generator.

Classic Scrabble players join me in saying that’s just wrong. If you don’t know any words, you lose. That’s how it goes. And that’s what dictionaries and challenges are for. They’re probably in there looking for how to spell "woot" which is suddenly legal, thanks to Webster.

(By the way, it’s not always good to follow Noah Webster’s and his successors’ lead, you know. Back in the day, after he removed the Us from words like colour and behaviour, he proposed the spelling of women be changed to "wimmin" like it sounds. Thankfully, he was overruled. Unfortunately, nobody stood up to "woot." But I will make a stand.)

It’s unusual that two different companies would cry copyright infringement over the same product, but in this case, Hasbro has US and Canada rights, and Mattel has the rights everywhere else. Obviously somebody leveraged a legal loophole at some point, but that won’t matter as hypocrisy has no place in legal proceedings.

Facebookers, as has often happened, are incensed and misguided as to why, and are scrambling to keep their beloved online past time just because they love it so much, whatever the legal rights of the copyright owners.

Nevertheless, Hasbro and Mattel are pretty set on squashing the game, which was developed by Calcutta-based Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who apparently have never heard of intellectual property. Otherwise, they may have worked a bit harder to name the game something other than an obvious derivative of the original.

Then again, it may not have spread like it did. Critics have suggested that the two toy companies buy or license the game outright, or hire the brothers rather than go the heavy-handed legal route. However, it really is a golden opportunity to smack an infringer and take his idea and rebrand it properly. Think of how much they’ll save in research in development – thanks Rajat and Jayant!