In addition to playing Jetman, competing in Food Friendzy to win CampusFood Cash and posting bumper stickers on friends' walls, users of the social-networking site Facebook.com have been improving their vocabulary skills.
But the almost 600,000 thousand Facebook users who play Scrabulous - a free, online version of the board game Scrabble-- - every day, may have to find a new hobby.
Earlier this month, the companies that own the rights to Scrabble, Hasbro and J.W. Spear & Sons PLC, a subsidiary of Mattel, wrote jointly to the U.S. head office of Facebook, asking the company to remove Scrabulous, citing copyright infringement.
Thus far, the Scrabulous application remains on the Web site.
The prospect of a Facebook without Scrabulous has Penn students divided. Some support the application and say Hasbro should use it as a marketing tool for the board game, while others see merit in the lawsuit.
College freshman Randall Rosenberg said she would be disappointed if the game were removed from Facebook.
"One of my best friends from home and I always used to play real Scrabble together," Rosenberg said. "And now she's in Boston and I'm here, so we have ongoing games that we play online."
There are currently 423 "Scrabulous" groups on Facebook, from "If Hasbro Kills Scrabulous, I will die!" to "PLEASE save Scrabulous."
But not all Penn students are intent on saving the application.
"Sadly I do think the lawsuit is fair," Wharton sophomore Mike Horowitz said. "There's no doubt they stole the idea from Scrabble. I'd say Facebook should probably remove the game."
College freshman Johnny Lloyd agreed.
"If it's not legal, it has to go off Facebook," he said. "I don't really see a problem with them taking it off."
Hasbro, the world's second-largest toy and game company, owns the rights to the Scrabble trademark in the United States and Canada, and Mattel, the largest toy company, owns the rights everywhere else.
Scrabulous was created in 2006 as a standalone site by the Calcutta, India-based brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla. The online game was added to Facebook in June 2007 and now has 2.3 million users, making it the ninth most popular Facebook application.
This is not the first time Hasbro has threatened to shut down an unauthorized game-imitation Web site. In 2005, Hasbro sent a cease-and-desist order to the popular Scrabble site e-scrabble.com. As of now, Electronic Arts - a developer and distributor of online and computer games - controls the online rights to Scrabble.
