You may have heard already that Hasbro and Mattel aren't too pleased about the hugely popular embeddable Facebook Scrabble game, Scrabulous. They want Facebook to pull Scrabulous from its app directory for infringing on a patent, and CNet currently has one of the handiest roundups out there of the debate and the issues at hand.

Scrabulous is identical to the board game, and the app's creators, Indian devs Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, are capitalizing on it through ads, giving Hasbro and Mattel fair ground on which to be peevish. But fans won't let go easily. CNet noticed that a "Save Scrabulous!" Facebook community is just one of the ways FB users are mobilizing to defend their pastime. According to CNET, more than 2 million users currently have Scrabulous embedded (disclosure: this editor is one of them).

From the article:

"'It wouldn't be an issue if Scrabulous weren't so popular, right?' observed Darren Herman, director of digital media for marketing firm The Media Kitchen. It's the sheer mass of Facebook Scrabulous users that have made it a high-profile case as well as an inevitably ugly situation, if the game is indeed taken down. 'We're seeing the power of social media in its early days. Since we're still trying to figure out the rules of the game, no pun intended, these types of issues are bound to arise.'

In other words, according to Herman, the debate over Scrabulous is indicative of the fact that the world--or at least certain mainstays of the game industry--still hasn't quite figured out that a traditional course of action just doesn't always work on the Web.

'I don't think they are crazy to think this way,' Darren Herman said when asked if Hasbro and Mattel are totally off base. 'Scrabble came out in a time when everyone guarded their (intellectual property) tightly.'"

But now, Hasbro and Mattel are focusing on the patent infringement issue, and in pressuring a take-down, are possibly overlooking the fact they have a new, passionate young fanbase numbering in the millions who are interested in a product which saw its heyday, in some cases, decades before they were even born. CNet argues -- and we concur -- that these game companies might be better-served capitalizing on Scrabulous' popularity, instead of opposing it.

[CNet - 'Scrabulous' debate may rewrite the rules of the game]