Wherefore Scrabulous?

There's a little snippet in the NY Times today about the Facebook application Scrabulous and how its creators are trying to extort money from the companies that own the rights to Scrabble.

On the one hand, Scrabulous is very often the only interesting thing that is happening on Facebook. So I would be sad to see it go.

On the other hand, dude, it's a total ripoff of Scrabble!

Speaking to the Scrabulous guys now: you're already (apparently) making wads of money, take the $10 million buyout or whatever and run! I don't even know why they're making an offer. For $50,000 they can get some other code-monkeys to clone your dinky little flash app and have Facebook shut you down for IP violations. Nobody on Facebook is going to care whether they're playing Scrabulous or Scrabble(TM).

Which, as of right now, is my odds-on favorite for how this is going to go down.