The rights to for the Scrabble board game are held by Hasbro in North America and Mattel in the rest of the world. Both companies kicked off an online storm when they accused the brothers of pirating their game.

However with over 700,000 daily users Scrabulous has a mighty fan following and when these fans threatened to boycott products made by Mattel and Hasbro, the gloves were off. Speculations are that the company will now buy the game from the Agarwalla brothers.

The whole story began in 2004 when the brothers created the software version of Scrabble and called it Bingo Binge. Apparently they were miffed when a website where they played the game decided to charge users.

In 2006 they renamed the game Scrabulous and in the following year added that app to popular social networking site Facebook. The brothers earn $25,000 per month from advertising on the game and based on that value, their creation could well be worth millions.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that negotiations are on between the two sides, but are being held up because the brothers are demanding hefty sums. Besides there is also potential copyright violation.

Nevertheless the bottom line is that users dictate the utility of any application and Scrabulous with its fanatic fan following is no different.