On September 17 Judge S Ravindra Bhat of the Delhi High Court restrained the brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from using the trade marks Scrabble, Scrabulous or any other deceptively similar trade mark.

Bhat disagreed with the Agarwalla's argument that the term Scrabble was generic.

But the judge ruled that the game did not have copyright protection. The judgment is not yet publicly available, but according to Indian IP academic Shamnad Basheer, writing on the blog Spicy IP , the judge stated that the game did not meet the standard of originality and there is no idea-expression dichotomy in the board, meaning that protecting the expression of the board would also protect the idea.

Pravin Anand, name partner of Anand & Anand, which acted for Mattel in the case, confirmed to Managing IP that the copyright section of the case was lost, but said: "The case was mainly about the trade mark, which was attracting the crowds."

Scrabulous is an online word game based on Scrabble. It was launched in 2005 and became the most popular application on social networking site Facebook in 2007, with more than 500,000 daily users reported.

Mattel owns the rights to the game of Scrabble in every country in the world except the US and Canada, where Hasbro owns the rights.

Hasbro filed a trade mark lawsuit against the Agarwalla brothers on July 22 and one week later Scrabulous was shut down for all users in North America.

On August 22, following a takedown request from Mattel, the game was removed from Facebook for all countries except India.