Scrabulous, the popular Scrabble-based game on Facebook, has been taken down from the US version of the social networking site.

The makers of Scrabulous said today that they had agreed to a request from Hasbro, the toymaker which owns the rights to the board game in the US, to remove their application from Facebook.

The decision ends a long-running dispute about Scrabulous, which Hasbro claims infringes on its own trademark, and will mean that any US-based Facebook user will no longer have access to the game. About 450,000 people use the application every day worldwide.

Facebook, which did not create the game but provides the platform on which it is played, said it had tried to remain neutral in the dispute, and that the decision to take down the application had been made by the Scrabulous creators themselves.

In a statement today, Jayant Agarwalla, a Calcutta-based software developer who created Scrabulous with his brother, Rajat, said: "This is an unfortunate event and not something we are very pleased about. We sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come."

It is unclear what the decision will mean for users of Scrabulous outside of North America. Mattel, the toymaker which owns the rights to Scrabble for the rest of the world, wrote to Facebook in January requesting that it take down the application and said that it would "actively protect" its brands and trademarks.

It is understood that Mattel has taken the matter up in the Indian courts but not, as yet, in Europe or elsewhere. Mattel could not immediately be reached for comment today.

The US dispute came to a head on Friday, when Hasbro announced it was suing the Agarwalla brothers for breach of copyright and trademark.

Hasbro is hoping that it can lure Scrabulous users over to its 'official' version of Scrabble, and share in the advertising revenues that accrue on widely trafficked sites.

The Agarwalla brothers have admitted to earning $25,000 (£13,000) a month from advertising on the application.

In a statement today Facebook said that it was "disappointed" Hasbro had drawn the company into its dispute over Scrabulous, and that in the future it hoped similar disputes could be resolved in a manner "that doesn't discourage other developers from using the Facebook platform to test new ideas."

The networking site, which is used by 80 million people worldwide, allows third party developers to build programs or 'applications' for the site that Facebook members can then download and use.

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