So earlier this week when we wrote that maybe it's not the best idea to start a business that revolves around ripping off copyrighted material? That should be revised to say it's a bad idea unless you have a backup plan. As you've likely heard, Scrabulous, the Facebook application that's a dead-ringer for Scrabble, was pulled from the site this week after the pair of Indian developers who created the game were slapped with a lawsuit by Hasbro, who holds the North American rights to Scrabble.

While that would have spelled the beginning of the end for a lot of businesses, the makers of Scrabulous obviously had a contingency plan. A day after Scrabulous was removed from Facebook, its developers released a new permutation of the game called Wordscraper. It's just different enough from Scrabble that it may be able to skirt any claims of copy right infringement from Hasbro. While the jury's still out on whether Wordscraper will be as popular as Scrabulous, the developers have demonstrated a tremendous amount of alacrity as entrepreneurs. Not only did they clearly plan for the worst case scenario in their business plan, but they were able to move forward with that plan quickly and deftly.

The great irony is that Hasbro, who filed the suit against Scrabulous and has since developed its own online Scrabble game, very obviously didn't plan as well. While Scrabulous' millions of devotees are now scattered—and up for grabs, Hasbro doesn't appear to have thought that far ahead. Already bloggers and Facebook users are complaining that not only is the official online Scrabble not as good, but it's buggy to boot ("Business Plan: Sue the competition, deliver an inferior products," says one gamer). Their PR machine isn't so good either. By filing suit against Scrabulous, Hasbro managed to anger a lot of the game's users. In a TechCrunch poll, 66% of respondents said that they think that, "Hasbro went too far with its lawsuit and will suffer a resulting consumer backlash."

It's a good lesson for entrepreneurs: with a little foresight and planning, sometimes a smaller company can outmaneuver the big guys.