The Monopolists summary

Have you ever played the Landlord’s Game? Probably not. But without this game, Monopoly as we know it today would not exist.

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie invented the Landlord’s Game in 1904. While the game had a lot in common with modern-day Monopoly, it also had some unique characteristics.

The Landlord’s Game continued to be sold but it never became a bestseller. Yet as the game's popularity grew, players began to modify the game, creating something new.

It all started with a community of Henry George advocates in the small town of Arden, Delaware. Players there added the names of New York streets and neighborhoods to the board.

The story of how Parker Brothers managed to copyright Monopoly is still shrouded in mystery.

Charles Darrow secured the copyright for Monopoly in 1933, although it's not clear what exactly the patent covered, as the original documents have been lost. Parker Brothers had to secure a further copyright if the company wanted to the rights for the entire game, however.

After securing patents and copyrights and silencing alternate histories of Monopoly’s creation, Parker Brothers went on to enjoy profitable decades as Monopoly became its best-selling game.

Few people knew or cared about how Monopoly came to be, and Parker Brothers had no problem with this state of affairs. Until that is, in 1973, when an economics professor shook things up.

Ralph Anspach knew he was up against a large, powerful corporation with a long history of crushing potential copyright breaches. The company even went after a priest who created a board game called Theopoly!

So how could he defeat Parker Brothers? Luckily, Anspach’s son learned a key bit of information, after reading a book called The Toy is Born, which said the inventor of Monopoly was a woman named Lizzie Magie.

So what happened after Anspach uncovered Parker Brothers's lies? How did the company react?

Initially, Parker Brothers offered Anspach $500,000 (some $2.2 million today) plus damages, as well as the opportunity to become a company executive – if he dropped the case and handed over the rights to his game.

In his appeal, Anspach tried a different approach. He and his lawyers decided to argue that when people bought the game Monopoly, they were really buying it because of its name rather than its brand.

This, they argued, negated the trademark. The name was the game's appeal, not the company. To prove this, they even conducted a survey illustrating that people cared only about the name “Monopoly” regardless of whether it was produced by Parker Brothers or not.