Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Monopoly Monopoly.
Hasbro (whatever happened to parker brothers?) is using the feds to sue a David Chang over "ghettopoly" or is it Ghettoopoly. Thousands of copies of his game have been seized.
Dude needs a lawyer.
Maybe Steve Jackson games would know somebody...
As someone who lives in the ghetto, I think the game is in poor taste.
It is quite obviously a parody, and protected under law.
The seizure is unconstitutional, and Hasbro seems to be conspiring to violate
Chang's civil rights, actionable under 42 USC 1983. The federal prosecutors would be immune, but ethical complaints could be filed against them, if we knew who they were.
Monopoly was invented about 100 years ago to illustrate the evils of land rent, by a woman in New Hampshire who was a follower of Henry George and the single taxers.
They believed that income from the land is our common heritage and should be shared equally, while use of the land is best left in private hands, through a system of long term leases. Arden, Delaware, two miles north of where I grew up, is a village founded on single-tax philosophy.
Later somebody added Atlantic City street names to their home version of the game, and that the rights to that version were bought by a toy company that became parker brothers. Given that there is a pre-existing version in the public domain [i'm a little iffy on that claim, feel free to google the anti-monopoly page and read about for yourself] and the product is obviously a parody, I don't see any trademark violation. Hat tip Howard.
The origin of the game was to show the injustice of disparities of wealth arising out of patterns of land ownership.
Formal slavery of africans and their african-european-native-american descendants has ended. Formal jim crow laws depriving this mixed-race group of equal rights has ended. The "last plantation" welfare-state system has been slowly eroding with more
of these mixed-race folks becoming wage slaves like the rest of us.
But disparities of land ownership continue. Overwhelmingly land in the US is owned by whites, and not held the residents of the ghetto, who tend to be the kin of those the land was taken from by force. A Georgist single-tax regime would remedy this inequality, and by abolishing other taxes, would allow the economy to grow without the tapeworm of the bloated government. Ghettopoly returns to the roots of the game as serious social criticism. That's the sort of thing the first amendment protects.
Some of the time.
Hasbro (whatever happened to parker brothers?) is using the feds to sue a David Chang over "ghettopoly" or is it Ghettoopoly. Thousands of copies of his game have been seized.
Dude needs a lawyer.
Maybe Steve Jackson games would know somebody...
As someone who lives in the ghetto, I think the game is in poor taste.
It is quite obviously a parody, and protected under law.
The seizure is unconstitutional, and Hasbro seems to be conspiring to violate
Chang's civil rights, actionable under 42 USC 1983. The federal prosecutors would be immune, but ethical complaints could be filed against them, if we knew who they were.
Monopoly was invented about 100 years ago to illustrate the evils of land rent, by a woman in New Hampshire who was a follower of Henry George and the single taxers.
They believed that income from the land is our common heritage and should be shared equally, while use of the land is best left in private hands, through a system of long term leases. Arden, Delaware, two miles north of where I grew up, is a village founded on single-tax philosophy.
Later somebody added Atlantic City street names to their home version of the game, and that the rights to that version were bought by a toy company that became parker brothers. Given that there is a pre-existing version in the public domain [i'm a little iffy on that claim, feel free to google the anti-monopoly page and read about for yourself] and the product is obviously a parody, I don't see any trademark violation. Hat tip Howard.
The origin of the game was to show the injustice of disparities of wealth arising out of patterns of land ownership.
Formal slavery of africans and their african-european-native-american descendants has ended. Formal jim crow laws depriving this mixed-race group of equal rights has ended. The "last plantation" welfare-state system has been slowly eroding with more
of these mixed-race folks becoming wage slaves like the rest of us.
But disparities of land ownership continue. Overwhelmingly land in the US is owned by whites, and not held the residents of the ghetto, who tend to be the kin of those the land was taken from by force. A Georgist single-tax regime would remedy this inequality, and by abolishing other taxes, would allow the economy to grow without the tapeworm of the bloated government. Ghettopoly returns to the roots of the game as serious social criticism. That's the sort of thing the first amendment protects.
Some of the time.
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