Slashdot Mirror

Monoply's patent was challenged and invalidated because of prior art. This was discovered during the anti-monoply legal battle.

Another example of a board game patent is on Khet. Claims 31-54 cover the play of the board game. It isn't unheard of for boardgammers to poke around expired patents (yes, the search is broken) for games to implement (the biggest challenge being translating legalease back into board game rules). Most games that I've come across while looking at patents I've never seen implemented/sold. Oh, another game that is covered by a patent - icehouse. Mr. Loony was quite happy and even made a Tshirt of it. Yes, that hippy is very much into patenting his games (though he also has a freeware licensing policy for computer implementations of his games).

One tends not to go to court to challenge a patent that is valid in the first place

Hasbro don't own Monopoly.
http://www.antimonopoly.com/

Monopoly isn't privately owned. It was developed as a 'folk' game by Quakers, and was in the public domain. Parker Brothers engaged in fraud in an attempt to get a monopoly on it, ironically enough--but they failed.

http://www.antimonopoly.com/ for the story.

With respect, the issues involved in the Monopoly case are far more complex than simple copyright infringement, or the lack thereof. See

http://www.antimonopoly.com/excerpt_court_ruling.h tml

and

http://www.washingtonfreepress.org/36/court.html

The provenance of the game renders the broader aspects public domain, so that only the specific artwork is protected. When you have a 'clean' game that is, for the sake of argument, original, there is the probability of much broader protection. Also, I suspect that Hasbro was substantially penalized for some form of litigation misconduct/copyright misuse regarding the provenance issue.

Those of us who are not armchair attorneys (and I am not referring to you, but some of the more blatantly mistaken posters) are not mixing the notions of patent, copyright, and sweat of the brow. Copyright can protect the expression of a method (e.g., a recipie), but not the use of the method or the product of the method (because of 17 U.S.C. 102(b)). Patent can protect the method or the product of the method, but it is supposed to be harder to obtain because it does not protect obvious variations (which would exclude most food recipies, BUT, for example, not a "recipie" for producing a cholesterol-free egg). Sweat-of-the-brow effort is in theory not protected, but you have to be careful how you apply the label. If I restore an early silent motion picture and market it, that sweat-of-the-brow is protected because, as a matter of precedent (and I'm talking about present restoration efforts, not some fully automated process), the restorer uses some non-trivial quantum of creative expression in replacing the damaged portions of the frames. Move the argument to colorization or color restoration for movies that are in the public domain, and the argument for creative selection is even stronger.

Almost every major board game has been extensively defended in this fashion, especially Monopoly, Battleship and The Game of Life, but more recently in the electronic world Tetris, Archon, Bandit Kings of Ancient China and so forth.

Minor correction: Monopoly is not patented. Hasbro stole the game and attempted to patent it, but the patent was declared fraudulent in court.

Once people made millions off of homemade board games that became outrageously popular, and many people tried to emulate the success. Now a hundred years of free market evolution has filtered out only the best board games, but guess what : people are still making millions off of them, and people are still loving games made even before the depression. Even still, if you have a bright idea you can easily enter the market (Think about the very popular new-comer "Cranium")

Look at today's most popular board games: Monopoly and Risk. You could argue that Risk isn't a bad game, but Monopoly certainly is. People don't buy them because they're good; rather, because they achieved critical market share and recognition. Monopoly is a popular present (Bob likes golf, let's buy him the Monopoly Golf edition for his birthday).

Cranium was successful because of the business skills of its creators (who by the way are ex-microsoft employees).

Meanwhile hundreds of games which would be much more fun to play are not known to anybody who doesn't check boardgamegeek.com.

P.S.
www.antimonopoly.com.

Before you believe everything Parker Bros tells you, you might want to check out a revised history of Monopoly by the inventor of Anti-Monopoly. An excerpt on the site from a US Supreme Court ruling in the matter suggests that the game is actually 100% pirated.

antimonopoly is what monopoly is really all about, but the focus was lost through marketing.

You might also look at getting cash flow

R

Tonight my wife and I are going to pickup a box of Monopoly from Toys R Us and/or a jigsaw puzzle.

NOOOOOOOOOO!

What is it with you Americans and Monopoly? Each year, hundreds of new board gamesare hoping for a little exposure, a little space on store shelves, and you keep buying Monopoly simpsons edition, Monopoly star wars edition, Monopoly yourcity edition, monopoly golf... Stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it! It's not even a good game, for crying out loud! Please just stop it! Or would you rather give Hasbro more money for domain disputes?

I'm sure a company like MS would never do that... all their products are startlingly original compared to the state of the art when they were first cloned^h^h^h^h^h^hinnovated.

http://www.antimonopoly.com

here's the link that wasn't working earlier.
--

Sub-domain'ing off their main domain makes much better sense - Hasbro isn't the only company who pick up domains left and right for everything under the sun.

Actually what would make more sense (from a consumer standpoint), is to simply have a seperate "directory", so that one would type "http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly" - in ads they would just need to give their web address of www.hasbro.com, and be done with it. If their site is properly organised (HAHA - right!!!), it shouldn't take more than one or two clicks to get to the product's "page".

Actually, now that I think about it, "http://www.hasbro.com/games/monopoly" would be best, since Hasbro makes/distributes other things as well (software, dolls, etc). Still, should be only one click from the main page, or two (one click to the games page, a second to the Monopoly page).

Of course, one could say fsck the whole thing and just go here.

I support the EFF - do you?

• http://inv entors.about.com/science/inventors/library/weekly/ aa123097.htm
• http://www.antimonopoly.com/ori ginal_boardgame.html