Some of you may remember the Scrabulous “scandal” that rocked fans’ worlds back in January. Basically you’ve got Scrabulous, an online version of a board game that, in all honesty, doesn’t see much table time nowadays.

Created by brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, a couple of software developers based in Kolkata, India, Scrabulous has seen many Facebookers become addicted to Scrabble. The two created the game in 2005 and launched it on Facebook as a third party application. When it comes to users, Scrabulous boasts numbers that would make Hasbro, the company that owns the rights to the original Scrabble, blush.

At the beginning of the year, Hasbro requested that Scrabulous be removed from Facebook on the grounds that the Agarwalla brothers had not gotten permission to use what’s legally Hasbro’s intellectual property. In other words, copyright infringement.

When word got around about Hasbro’s request, fans started a Save Scrabulous group on Facebook, which in the space of 24 hours went from 600 members, to 13,000. The number of Save Scrabulous groups (ranging from “Save our Scrabulous !! Hands off hasbro !!!” to “Give us Scrabulous or give us death!”) has now grown to over 50 and combined, members total over 61,000. There are, of course, a handful groups petitioning on behalf of Scrabble (Sue Scrabulous, Save Scrabble) however, they fall slightly short in numbers with approximately 47 members.

Yesterday Hasbro issued a second take down notice to Facebook, which the social networking site says it has passed on to the developers. While the first take down notice went, well, sort of unnoticed, we think Hasbro will be more aggressive this time around. Seven months ago, all they had on their hands was a copyright infringement suit. Now, with the launch of EA’s electronic version of Scrabble (yes, EA has permission) there’s more of an incentive to purge Facebook of the Scrabulous application. Thousands of people are playing each day on pages that display ads, which means revenue for Facebook and money for the developers.

Many Scrabulous fans think that ultimately, Hasbro is shooting itself in the foot with the lawsuit. When the troubles began back in January, one fan in the Save Scrabulous group said, "I didn’t have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months ago. Since I got hooked on that I have bought two sets."

We’ll be interested to see how this one turns out. Whether Hasbro decides to sue for royalties and have the game removed or whether the company strikes a deal whereby Scrabulous creators pay them a cut of the profits.