MORE than 150,000 Singaporean Internet users were left hanging, some in mid-word, when a highly popular online version of Scrabble on social networking site Facebook was shut down last weekend around the world.

According to the creators of Scrabulous, brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from India, Facebook took down the application following a request from Mattel on Aug 14.

Mattel had said that Scrabulous impinged on its copyright and trademark, being too similar to Scrabble.

The game company, Mattel, did not respond to repeated queries from The Straits Times over the week, but it looks like double word score for the owners of the copyright. Hasbro, which owned the rights in North America, successfully got it shut down on US and Canadian Facebook servers on July 29.

Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble elsewhere, has now followed suit, applying to the Indian High Court in February to shut down the application.

'It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the High Court's decision,' said the brothers in an e-mail response to The Straits Times.

The Scrabulous saga has enthralled and enraged the Internet community for months.

While many are up in arms over what they view as strong-arm tactics from game companies, others have simply moved on - to other Scrabble-like games on Facebook and an official Mattel version.

There is also www.scrabulous.com, where the Agarwalla brothers host their game.

Like music and movie producers before them, traditional games publishers are being dragged into the anything- goes realm of the online world, where users openly download, copy and pass around files with no qualms about violating intellectual property rights.

Lawyers say that games are protected too, and companies can crack down speedily on illegal use. 'As long as you're the creator of the intellectual property , then it deserves to be protected,' said Mr Bryan Tan, director of Keystone Law Corporation.

Hasbro, which owns another word game, Boggle, also threatened its Facebook version, Bogglific. That shut down and came back to life as the sufficiently different Prolific.

The thing about games is that they are not easily copied and passed around, unlike MP3 music files, said Mr Tan.

People who play these games online are unlikely to be prosecuted unless they download and make copies of them.

One Scrabulous player, blogger Hoo Shao Pin, 39, has a solution: Make Scrabulous legitimate.

'I'm definitely supportive of intellectual property. But I expected Mattel to buy the company which developed Scrabulous,' he said.

'I believe Scrabulous will increase its offline sales. Don't disrupt a win-win situation.'

Only users in India can get Scrabulous now. The brothers say they will decide what to do after the High Court's decision.

tanwz@sph.com.sg