How do you spell

Love hurts, even if it is just a game. Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla created Scrabulous, a Facebook application based on the board game Scrabble, as a labour of love.

But for Hasbro and Mattel, the marketers of Scrabble, the online version of the game created by the brothers from Calcutta has become a major headache. Scrabulous represents an obvious infringement on a brand 50 years in the making. However, the Facebook application boasts three million registered users, a market that Hasbro and Mattel would do well to tap into and certainly do not want to offend.

To sue or not to sue? Hasbro, which markets Scrabble in North America, and Mattel, which handles sales elsewhere, chose the first option.

“Hasbro has spent many years building the Scrabble brand, and this type of infringement is no less egregious than what has occurred in other industries, including the film and television business,” reads the official statement from Hasbro, which is developing its own online version of Scrabble with video-game company Electronic Arts.

But are the two companies overreacting? Deborah Weinstein, partner and co-founder of Toronto public relations firm Strategic Objectives, understands Hasbro’s and Mattel’s position. “If they allow [Scrabulous to continue], then basically they’ve lost their trademark,” she says. Yet Weinstein and others in the PR world acknowledge that traditional forms of brand protection, particularly litigation, may not always be in a marketer’s best interests.

“The problem is that these traditional companies, all they know is, ‘We make board games, and if you knock off a board game, we sue you,’ ” says Bonin Bough, executive vice-president, interactive, social and emerging media at Weber Shandwick’s New York office.

But rather than resort to litigation, says David Morelli, vice-president and director at Toronto’s Cohn & Wolfe, companies must look for creative ways to take advantage of consumer-created riffs on their brands. After all, a lawsuit can result in a negative PR blowback that can spread quickly through social media and cause more damage to a brand than simple trademark infringement. “Here’s a grassroots community that has embraced what some would have considered to be a tired brand and revived it,” Morelli says of Scrabulous. “Hasbro has the chance to either make three million friends or three million enemies.”

As of press time, Hasbro and Mattel had not resolved their legal fight with the Agarwallas, and Scrabulous was still online. Regardless of how it plays out, the Scrabulous situation highlights how social media has put brands, more than ever, in the hands of consumers. In some cases, marketers might do well to leave them there.