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Continuing from the previous page, I began investigating the history of the
world's best-selling board game, uncovering a trail of
controversy surrounding Monopoly beginning in 1936, the
year that Parker Brothers purchased the rights to the game
from Charles Darrow.
This week the story continues with the 1974 lawsuit
brought by the General Mills Fun Group, once owners of
Parker Brothers and Monopoly ®, against Ralph Anspach, the
inventor/designer of the Anti-Monopoly® board game and
Ralph Anspach's monopolization lawsuit against the current
owners of Monopoly ®.
Go straight
to jail, do not collect $200 or say anything vaduely
similar.
Dr. Ralph Anspach, economics professor and inventor of a
board game called Anti-Monopoly, put his product on the
market in 1974 with great sales prospects. Parker Brothers
and General Mills threatened to sue anyone involved with
the sale of Anti-Monopoly for infringement of its
trademark of the word Monopoly. Dr. Anspach (a man of
relatively modest salary) found himself facing a lawsuit
against the 57th largest corporation in America.
Carl Person, a New York based lawyer, was willing to
take on the case on a contingency basis to help Dr.
Anspach fight what turned into a ten-year court battle.
Twice a lower federal court ruled against Anti-Monopoly
and at one point 40,000 Anti-Monopoly games were buried in
a Minnesota landfill by court order. Ralph Anspach
mortgaged his home to pay the court costs and faced a loss
of his home. Then the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a
victory in 1984. Ralph Anspach was back in business and
l/2 million copies of Anti-Monopoly sold in the same year.
 Anti-Monopoly
Game Card
But the game was not over yet, the country's largest toy
manufacturer, Hasbro Inc. went on a toy manufacturer's
shopping spree and bought Parker Brothers, soon after
Ralph Anspach's victory in supreme court. Hasbro Inc.
become the new owners of Monopoly and with the purchase of
many other board-game producers, Hasbro Inc. gained
control of at least 80% of the American board-game market.
A deal was signed between two giant toy retailers, Toys
'R' Us and Kmart, and Hasbro. The fine print included an
agreement for the two chains not to buy any competing
product. Ralph Anspach and Anti-Monopoly suddenly faced
serious marketing problems.
Ralph Anspach protested to the Federal
Trade Commission with no results. He has gone back to
court, with a monopolization case pending, Anti-Monopoly
Inc. v. Hasbro, Inc., Toys 'R' Us and Kmart Corp. Carl
Person is again representing Ralph Anspach in court.
His complaint charges that the defendant Hasbro, Inc. has
been allowed by the Federal Trade Commission to acquire by
merger over 80% of the board-game market and has funneled
over 50% of that entire U.S. market through the defendants
Toys 'R' Us and Kmart. He also claims that Hasbro, Inc.
used a variety of anti-competitive practices, including
predatory price discrimination, to destroy the network of
wholesalers, retailers and independent sales
representatives. Small toy manufacturers have to depend on
that network to bring products to market.
So
far, the lower court judge has refused to even let Anspach
go to trial, granting summary judgment to the defendants.
Ralph Anspach published a book on his experiences and I heartily recommend
reading it. It is an amazing story. Ralph Anspach deserves
the real credit for unearthing the true history of
Monopoly while developing his defense case against the
Parker Brothers' infringement suit.
Ralph Anspach
on Maxine Brady's "The Monopoly Book, Strategy and
Tactics"
"Here's a sidelight to the Brady book. I broke the story on the real history and
the Parker Brothers/Darrow fraud in a debate with Maxine
on a major New York talk show. Maxine was taken a back by
the Quaker game I had brought to the show. But she is
quick on her feet so she said something like who cares
about who invented the game; the only thing which matters
is that Monopoly is the greatest game ever invented.
I
responded by saying that Monopoly had evolved in the
public domain for thirty years but once it fell into
private ownership, its evolution stopped while chess
evolved for two thousand years before it found its present
form. So how do we know that the Quaker version of
Monopoly, stolen from the public domain, cannot be
improved upon? Maxine answered that Monopoly was perfect
and no one could improve it.
On
the flight home to San Francisco, I worked out the details
of the Anti-Monopoly game now on the market in response to
Brady's challenge. Whether Anti-Monopoly is an improved
version has not yet been tested since Monopoly excluded us
from the board game market. But the web is still free so
we will see when we put Anti-Monopoly out on the web." -
Ralph Anspach
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