WORD PERFECT: Brothers Agarwalla are raking in the moolah with Lexulous (Pic: Nilmoni Debnath)

If you are a Facebook addict, you may have played a round or two of Lexulous. That’s the new sport on the social networking site that’s caught the fancy of those who love word games.

For two brothers in Calcutta, Lexulous spells one word — and that’s hope. Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla are the men behind the new game, midwifed by two court cases — and a legion of fans. But Rajat, 27, and Jayant, 22, stress they were “surprised and disappointed” to find themselves pitted against Scrabble’s Hasbro and Mattel, which accused them of violating their copyright and trademark. Hasbro has the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada while Mattel has the rights in the rest of the world.

“We have not done anything wrong or illegal. Our conscience is clear,” Jayant says, sitting comfortably in his small, glass-panelled office in Space Town near Calcutta airport. Peering out of the shelves behind him are all kinds of motivational books, including the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series. And then there are several books by John Grisham, an author whose ordinary heroes have often bested the smartest of multinationals.

Till a couple of years ago, few knew about the Agarwalla brothers. Then one fine day in June 2007, the brothers posted a word game called Scrabulous on Facebook as an application. Scrabulous turned out to be the most sought-after application on the site, with more than 5,00,000 daily users. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called himself its “fan”.

Hasbro and Mattel, clearly, did not figure in the list of fans. In separate lawsuits filed in a New York court and the Delhi High Court, the two companies accused the Agarwallas of “knocking the board game off” on the Net.

That was the start of trouble for the Agarwallas. Facebook dropped Scrabulous from its site in the United States and Canada after Hasbro filed a case alleging copyright and trademark violation in New York in July last year. Facebook then dropped Scrabulous from the rest of the world after Mattel, the premier toy maker whose brand includes Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, served Facebook with a notice.

The brothers say Hasbro recently withdrew the case it filed against RJ Softwares — the company Rajat floated in Calcutta in 2000 and named after him and his brother, joining the initials of their first names. “It was an out-of court settlement that we signed on December 12, 2008,” Jayant says, refusing to disclose the details of the deal. “We are under a secrecy agreement” is all he will say.

The brothers decline to furnish any revenue figures, but Mattel claimed in court papers that they had clocked up sales of about Rs 13 crore in India since 2003, and spent roughly Rs 51 lakh on marketing and promotion.

On September 17 last year, the Delhi High Court passed its first ruling on the intellectual property case filed by Mattel in February 2008. In a 29-page judgement, Justice S. Ravindra Bhat virtually accepted that there was trademark violation and “restrained” the Agarwallas from using the word Scrabble or Scrabulous.

So enter Lexulous. The game, introduced on January 1 this year, already claims 5,18,000 daily users. There are some differences between Scrabulous and Scrabble and the new game, though these are minor. For instance, Lexulous players get eight tiles instead of the seven in Scrabble and Scrabulous, and the points for letters vary. On Lexulous, ‘z’ comes with 12 points, unlike the 10 that Scrabble bestows on the 26th alphabet.

Rajat stresses that they have not broken any law. “We have followed whatever the Delhi High Court ordered and changed the name of our game,” he says. “The court hasn’t asked us to stop the game,” Jayant adds.

Abhishek Manu Singhvi, lawyer for the Agarwallas, stresses that a “part” of the court judgement is in favour of his clients. “It is a ruling by a single judge. The case is now in appeal before a division bench of the Delhi High Court and it won’t be proper for me to comment on the case at this stage,” he says.

The court declined to grant Mattel’s copyright claim “at this stage.” Mattel has appealed against the ruling in the division bench of the high court. Mattel’s lawyer Arun Jaitley declines to comment. “It’s an intellectual property case and we have gone in for an appeal,” Jaitley, a senior BJP leader, says.

A Calcutta lawyer who handles intellectual property cases says the copyrights trademark or patent laws of the country are “not as strict” as those in the United States. “There are areas here that are hazy, unclear and often open to interpretation. People on either side of an intellectual case could take advantage of this,” the senior lawyer says.

For the Agarwalla brothers — both commerce graduates from Calcutta’s St Xavier’s College who were never trained in computer applications — the Delhi High Court ruling doesn’t spell the end of the road.

Lexulous has a users’ rating of 4.9 out of 5 on Facebook. Hasbro’s Scrabble, meant for users in the US and Canada, has more users than Lexulous but gets a rating of 1.3 out of 5. Mattel’s Scrabble, with some 3,53,000 daily users, has a rating of 1.8.

There’s even a separate website called Lexulous.com and a mobile version of the game, also available on Facebook. Lexulous can be played on a BlackBerry and some other phones, and will soon be made available to iPhone and Apple Mac users. The brothers won’t say how much moolah they have raked in with Lexulous, but their business is clearly flourishing. “We are making enough through ad revenue to run our company with some 25 developers,” Jayant says.

Besides Lexulous, RJ Softwares has at the moment two more applications on Facebook — chess and wordscraper, another word game. Jayant says they are also in the process of building a “killer” application — a poker game.

What keeps them going, the brothers say, is their passion for word games. “That, and a commitment to keep the Internet applications free,” says Rajat.

Quite like their favourite Grisham heroes, the two brothers believe that they have stood up for a cause. But there’s still a small matter of the law that needs to be resolved. And the jury is still out on that.