Hasbro Inc, that owns the US and Canadian rights to Scrabble, has “settled” the dispute with Calcutta-based RJ Softwares, the creators of the online word game Scrabulous (now Lexulous).

Brothers Agarwalla — Rajat, 27, and Jayant, 22 — working out of VIP Road see this paving the way for their game’s return to the social networking site Facebook.

The toy giant had claimed copyright over Scrabulous, “a virtual version of Scrabble” in July this year, in a federal court in New York.

“Hasbro had filed for temporary injunction. They have now filed for dismissal after an out-of-court settlement,” said Jayant.

Facebook had removed the application from its site on August 22. “Lexulous should be back now; we will talk to Facebook. We had five million users on our site, and we’ll try our best to give the game back to them,” said Jayant.

Fans are currently playing Lexulous on Lexulous.com and Wordscraper on Facebook.

A statement issued on December 12 by Hasbro and RJ Softwares said: “RJ Softwares has agreed not to use the term Scrabulous and has made changes to the Lexulous and Wordscraper games (in the US and Canada) to distinguish them from the Scrabble crossword game. Based on these modifications Hasbro has agreed to withdraw the litigation filed against RJ Softwares in federal court in New York in July of this year…”

But the legal battle is not over yet for the siblings from St Xavier’s College. Toy giant Mattel Inc — which holds the worldwide trademark rights for Scrabble except in the US and Canada — has filed an appeal to the division bench, after having lost the copyrights to Scrabulous in a ruling by Delhi High Court in September. The matter has been scheduled for further hearing on January 12.

“We won’t be giving up. The users are very happy with Lexulous and 70 per cent of the users are back on Lexulous.com. Our new game Wordscraper is also doing great,” said Jayant.