Scrabulous, which had created a stir in the online game world, is back on Facebook, though with a new name, refreshed rules and circular tiles in an effort to help its developers avoid legal claims from the makers of Scrabble, a popular word game.

The re-launch came less than two days after the makers of Scrabulous disabled their well-known version of the online word game from US and Canadian Facebook users. The owner of Scrabble’s North American rights, Hasbro Inc. had earlier sued the Indian makers of Scrabulous.

With the change in name to Wordscraper, it could help the makers skirt any brand confusion with Scrabble, which is a key point in the disputes regarding trademark. Moreover, the game has also undergone some changes, such as using circles instead of Scrabble-like square tiles. The tiles that earn double and triple points have been reorganized, while tiles that fetch quadruple points have been included.

However, it cannot be said as yet whether these design alterations will protect the makers from copyright infringement claims. While ideas cannot be copyrighted, expressions of ideas certainly can. Hence, the case could turn even if Wordscraper feels more like a generic board game based on words, or Scrabble.

Not only this, Wordscraper also enables users design custom boards, which includes versions that happen to be similar to Scrabble. In these situations, federal protections from liability for their user’s account might be claimed by Wordscraper.

The news regarding the restructure of game started spreading like fire through blogs and soon after, thousands of Facebook users had already added the new application. Even then, this figure couldn’t match the enormous list of daily users that had been using Scrabulous.

Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla had earlier been sued by Hasbro in US District Court in New York, claiming copyright and trademark violation.

Under a broad licensing agreement with Hasbro, video game maker Electronic Arts Inc. released an official version of Scrabble for American as well as Canadian users of Facebook, soon following the lawsuit. However, the official version of Scrabble is still in a ‘beta’ test mode, unable to connect well with the users so far.