The tweens and twenty-somethings who flock to the site can still keep playing games there without paying. But the company wants to convince a few of them to start shelling out $5 a month for subscriptions that gives them access to bonus goodies and credits they can use for power-ups and other virtual goods. The credits will first be used on the site’s new “Hover Kart” game and will eventually be rolled out it to the rest of its 11-game portfolio.

Virtual goods + subscriptions + online games isn’t a new idea by any stretch. It’s really big in Asia, and there are several companies trying to port the model to the U.S. Some, most notably Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft and Disney’s (DIS) Club Penguin, are enjoying success on a large scale. I’m just noting OMGPOP’s foray for a couple reasons:

1) Gotta give the company credit for sticking to its guns, from an intellectual property perspective. The site has no problem taking games that have been successful for other people and offering refurbished versions of its own. “Blockles,” its first game, is a Tetris clone. And Hover Kart, its newest one, is an homage to Nintendo’s Mario Kart, which absconded with many of my hours in the mid-90s.

The folks at OMGPOP (and their backers, which include Twitter investor Spark Capital) think this is kosher because they’re not using the games’ trademarked names or characters–only their game play/mechanics (see: the Scrabble/Scrabulous/Lexulous imbroglio). But they’re already spending money defending a Tetris lawsuit, and it will be interesting to see what Nintendo’s legal team has to say about the new game.

2) Gotta give the company, and founder Charles Forman, credit for evolving. Two years ago, Forman was a Y Combinator graduate running a site called iminlikewithyou that was supposed to be some kind of flirting/dating/Facebook hybrid. It got glowing praise from the likes of Om Malik, but it was hard to see how it was going to amount to a business. So Forman changed direction and turned it into a game site.

Fast-forward to today and it’s still not clear if there’s a successful business yet–the site has sold a couple T-shirts, but that’s about it. But at least you can see how it might work. And compared to a lot of its Web 2.0 peers, that’s saying something.

“Copyrights are not supposed to protect board games,” intellectual property attorney Pete Kinsella told CNet News.com. “What copyrights protect is the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself. The law allows people to design around things, and particularly when there isn’t patent protection, the law has great incentive to design around things by making things somewhat different.”

Which is an unfortunate state of affairs for Hasbro (HAS): The newly launched Wordscraper has, in a very short time, already signed up 3,569 users. And it will surely gather more as word of its debut spreads. What will the game company do now? What will it do if Wordscraper’s creators release it as a true board game?

“Scrabble: Every Word’s a WINNER!”

Except for Scrabulous, apparently. The online knockoff of Hasbro’s 75-year-old word game has been removed from Facebook at the game-maker’s request. “In response to a legal request from Hasbro, the copyright and trademark holder for Scrabble in the U.S. & Canada, the developers of Scrabulous have suspended their application in the U.S. and Canada until further notice,” Facebook explained in a statement.

Not exactly a surprise, given recent events. Last week, Hasbro filed suit against Scrabulous creators Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, claiming trademark and copyright infringement. “Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, at the time. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.”

An understandable view. Scrabulous is, let’s face it, trading on Scrabble’s name and conceit. And, until it was pulled, it had over two million users and was generating over $25,000 per month in revenue–for someone other than Hasbro. That said, when was the last time you played Scrabble offline?

If you answered, “I can’t recall,” or “at Aunt Marge’s house when I was eleven,” you’re probably like a lot of other folks out there who only rediscovered the game because of Scrabulous. And when you think about it that way, Scrabulous could have been the perfect licensing opportunity for Hasbro (HAS), had the company decided to view it as that, instead of an affront to its intellectual property. Two-million- users-and-growing is a hell of a lot better than the 8,900 users the official Scrabble Facebook app has garnered since its launch earlier this month.

So far.

Although the popular Facebook widget was supposed to be taken down two weeks ago and then last week–pretty much because it obviously infringed on the rights of the owners of the popular word game Scrabble–it is still up and working on the service and allowing new downloads (I did it last night, for example).

And sources with knowledge of the situation say that it is not likely to go–for now at least–as the parties involved attempt to come to some sort of agreement about its ownership and future. In fact, those sources expect a settlement soon between the many sides involved.

There are many sides, including its developers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla (pictured here) of Calcutta, India; Hasbro and Mattel, the toy and game giants who co-own the rights to Scrabble; and even Electronic Arts, which has the online rights to Scrabble.

Oh, yes, and Facebook, which hosts the offending application, and which has been curiously silent despite its important role here.

Hasbro and Mattel had asked the hot social-networking site to pull it, and had also sent a cease-and-desist order to the Scrabulous creators.

Cue the quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiating.

Of course, there has been a lot of noisier wrangling with “Save Scrabulous” groups going up on Facebook created by its loyal users–there are more than 600,000 active daily ones on Facebook.

And, of course, they love Scrabulous (a game is pictured above). Why not? It’s fun, interactive and there is a real community that has been formed around it that is passionate.

That’s exactly what social networking should be about.

But, while I might sound like a skunk at a garden party, it’s also pretty amazing that Scrabulous’s creators had the audacity to just steal the famous concept and trademark and run with it. Worse still, its proponents think that’s just great.

It’s not, because it is out-and-out stealing of a well-known brand and that shoplifting should not be the way businesses are formed in the Web 2.0 economy.

Moreover, Facebook should be among the first to crack down on this kind of juvenile behavior (curiously, Scrabulous is an actually useful app, unlike others I have derided on Facebook as more suited for toddlers) all over the service, whether it relates to music, videos or anything else its third-party developers take without asking.

Can you imagine the hue and cry if The Wall Street Journal suddenly debuted a widget called “Monopolicious!”–a rip-off of Monopoly, complete with Park Place–on Facebook?

We’ll see if Facebook will truly do the kind of house-cleaning it needs. I hope so, because it would show a real step in the growth of its corporate culture and would go a long way in creating the kind of mature platform it has the potential to be.