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A long-running dispute about who owns the rights to Monopoly has dogged the world's most successful board game.
Here Ciaran Jennings reports on a new initiative involving an area featured on one of the board's squares that is bound to raise Georgist eyebrows.
Set in the heart of London's theatreland Coventry Street was laid out in London's West End in 1681 and has always been considered a place of entertainment.
Now home to the Prince of Wales theatre first opened in 1884, renamed in 1886, and redesigned in 1937 the street is probably best known worldwide as one of the three yellow squares at the top of the Monopoly board, sandwiched between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus.
This is ironic for two reasons.
The first reason is that the modern Coventry Street is today at the centre of a scheme to form a Business Improvement District (BID) that will prospectively be funded by a land value tax (LVT).
The second is that the game of Monopoly, that put Coventry Street on the world's stage itself, has been the subject of intense wrangling over the nature of the game and who owns its rights. Why?
In 1904 Lizzie Magie, a passionate supporter of Henry George's arguments for LVT, patented a game called the Landlords' Game.
Magie's game became a popular pass-time among America's Quaker community. Magie's game was designed so that it could be played in two separate but connected ways.
The aim of the first was for players to buy and sell property in such a way that the contestants attempted to bankrupt their opponents. The second way involved players adhering to the Georgist philosophy of communal benefit the more land each player owned the more LVT he or she paid.
The intention was for the game to be an educational tool in promoting the Georgist view of a fairer society, and the show the dangers of not adhering to his philosophy.
Some 23 years later, however, two brothers, Fred and Louis Thun, taught the game to Dan Layman, a college friend of theirs, who decided to develop an offshoot game, which he originally called the Finance Game, before patenting it as Monopoly.
As well as changing the name Layman patented his rewritten rules, which dispensed with the Georgist perspective and focused on the capitalist method. In 1930 Charles Darrow, an unemployed engineer, was playing a version of the game with some Quaker friends and decided he could sell the idea to a US games developer, called Parker Brothers.
Parker Brothers rejected the game as having too many flaws and so Darrow started making sets himself and selling them off his own back. This proved a successful decision, as it showed the games company that a property-based board game was popular and had economic viability.
As a result Parker Brothers bought the rights and Darrow became a millionaire.
In order to stop anyone else doing what Darrow had done, Parker Brothers realised they had to stop other people being able to produce a similar game, so they bought the rights to the Magie and Layman versions too.
One of the conditions of the Magie patent was that Parker Brothers had to produce her original Landlords' Game, which the company did for a short while before burying it and concentrating on the Monopoly we know today. Then in 1974 Ralph Anspach, an economics professor, decided he wanted to show how business monopolies were a bad thing and how they could be dismantled. He based his game on Monopoly but called his game Anti-Monopoly.
By this time Parker Brothers had been bought by General Mills, who went to court to stop Anspach. The General Mills argument was that it owned the rights to the name and therefore nobody could sell a version with their game's name anywhere in its title.
Anspach won the argument that the name was already in the public domain in the US Supreme Court, but ultimately lost his rights to sell Anti-Monopoly when judges ruled that his game was too similar in design to Monopoly itself. The Coventry Street initiative is bound to raise some eyebrows amongst Henry George's supporters.
BIDs are a government initiative designed to get local businesses to work together and form a non-profit making management company to co-ordinate and implement development over a local area.
Coventry Street is one of five areas looking to become a BID and wants to run itself along the same lines as BIDs in the US. These use Smart Tax (LVT) to raise the investment needed to revitalise rundown areas. The idea behind BIDs is to create a company that operates a “shopping-centre style management, according to Julie Grail of the Central London Partnership a company set up to administer £4.6 million of government Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) money.
The Piccadilly Circus Partnership, the business consortium formed to push for BID status, has invested £750,000 in the area and will receive part of the SRB money.
Even with the SRB investment there is a lot of enthusiasm for using LVT as the main funding method for the proposed BID. Grail says: “The government has allowed a levy to be made on all businesses in a BID but the details aren't finalised.
“This levy would be based on the current rating list, so the burden would fall on tenants. We believe the rating list could be used more effectively through making landlords pay as well.
“Landowners are actually keen to pay as they want to be involved in funding the regeneration so that they have an influence over how the area is developed.
Has Liz Magie got the final laugh?
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