This is stupid. Hasbro largely did the right thing. They protected their brand, and the right to make money off of it online. There's nothing but speculation here as to Scrabulous moving copies of their real world product, or their "boycott" amounting to anything but a couple dozen boards not sold.

Perhaps they should have licensed Scrabulous rather than trying to build their own, but gaining control over their brand online was the right thing to do.

I am blatantly not a lawyer but from my understanding you can not patent rules to a game. So the clever thing to do would be implementing a "word game engine" which allows users to upload their rules to it and share those rules, if they happen to be scrabble-esque..? Are you responsible for all user content in that situation? (serious question)

It's sort of a big legal crazy gray area full of pitfalls and madness. I am far from a laywer, but it appears that if you intentionally turn a blind eye towards the user generated content UNTIL there is a complaint, ract with an immediate and complete takedown, then it seems OK. Maybe? Who knows?

The makers of Scrabulous did exactly this.

Let's hope this never happens again... Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children.