Trivial Pursuit Intellectual Property dispute drawing to a close

January 6, 2007 Humans have been playing board games for at least 8000 years, with the most popular board game in history being Monopoly. In 1981, Trivial Pursuit burst onto the scene, establishing a new genre of board game and with more than 90 million games sold in 33 countries and 19 languages, three television shows spawned (in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany), and an electronic version now available on mobile phones from most major mobile carriers in the U.S., the success of the game and its inventors is the stuff of legend, business school case studies and … law suits. A case currently before the courts in Nova Scotia (Canada) is going down to the wire to decide the rightful inventor of the wildly popular board game. The dispute dates back 12 years and centres around the claims of Cape Breton resident David Wall who says Chris Haney (one of the two acknowledged inventors of the game along with Scott Abbott) picked him up hitchhiking in 1979 and during the ride he described his concept for the game to Haney who went on to collect the biggest royalty cheque in board game history. The local newspaper, the Cape Breton Post, has all the details. If there’s a moral in the story for our audience of people who love clever ideas, it’s that good ideas (i.e. valuable Intellectual Porperty) should not be disclosed to complete strangers.

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