The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, an online knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with more than 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.
Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.
Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which sells it everywhere else.
In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. The companies said they were hoping for an amicable solution that would not force them to shut down the game.
Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite site had started charging, he said.
“Our family has been playing the game for 50 years now,” said Jayant, who received a set when the game first came out in India. His mother encouraged him and his 26-year-old brother, Rajat, to play as a learning tool, often with a dictionary by the board.
Scrabulous, which most players use on the Facebook social networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble and the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages.
There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics, and its most popular version does not allow fake words.
It cannot, however, prevent players from cheating. One method is an online “helper” program, which generates a…