Monopoly, Anti-Monopoly, and intellectual property rights on board games

An update on a famous but now-lame board game-- with an interesting historical twist and a connection to economics-- from Mary Pilon in the WSJ...

And if you need it, one more reason never to play Monopoly again!

Ralph Anspach, an 83-year-old economics professor, spent decades locked in a real-life battle with Monopoly and its corporate owners. The campaign dented his finances, sent him on a nationwide trek for intelligence and sparked a legal case that reached the steps of the Supreme Court.

Prof. Anspach's woes began with a real-life trademark fight for the right to sell his own game, called Anti-Monopoly. Along the way, he says he helped to publicize the little-known origins of the classic American game.

The official history of Monopoly, a version of which appears on Hasbro's Web site, describes how Charles B. Darrow developed Monopoly during the Great Depression. Parker Brothers, which was later acquired by Hasbro, bought the impoverished heater salesman's patent in 1935 and registered the Monopoly trademark. Since then, the company says, an estimated 750 million copies of Monopoly have been sold worldwide.

The Monopoly "legend," as Hasbro calls it, "is a corporate fairy tale," says Prof. Anspach, who argues that the company fails to acknowledge key players in the game's genesis.

Prof. Anspach flew across the country more than a dozen times to research the game's origins. His logic: If he could prove that Monopoly was widely played as a folk game decades before the Darrow patent, then he could argue that his game didn't infringe on Parker Brothers' trademark....

The real story, he says, began in 1904 with a patent from a Quaker named Elizabeth Magie. Her invention, "The Landlord's Game," spread as a folk game, designed to show the downsides of capitalism. The Atlantic City Quaker School simplified it, making it more accessible to children. Game historians widely believe that this simpler version was later shown to Mr. Darrow by a friend in the early 1930s....

One day in the 1970s, Prof. Anspach tried to explain oil cartels and the downside of monopolies to his 8-year-old son, William. The economist searched toy stores for a more philosophically pleasing alternative to Monopoly, but found nothing.

He then set out to create a game that would be a sort of "Monopoly backwards," in which players compete to break up existing monopolies rather than create them. He called it "Anti-Monopoly." The game sold 200,000 copies the first year....

In February 1974, Prof. Anspach received a letter from an attorney for Parker Brothers requesting he immediately stop peddling Anti-Monopoly. The company objected to the use of its trademarked Monopoly name....

In 1979, Prof. Anspach finally prevailed in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California, where the case was dismissed. The court determined that the trademark "Monopoly" was generic, and therefore unenforceable. Parker Brothers pushed the trademark case to the Supreme Court. It was denied...Years after losing thousands of games and the ability to sell his product, Prof. Anspach reached a settlement with Hasbro. Today, he markets Anti-Monopoly under a license from the company....