Ralph Anspach was an economics professor at San Francisco State University who developed and released the anti-monopoly board game Anti-Monopoly in 1973. His game led to a major legal dispute when Parker Brothers sued him for trademark infringement. In the course of that litigation, Anspach was forced to demonstrate that the word “Monopoly” and the game system itself had not been invented by Parker Brothers or Charles Darrow, but had existed earlier as a public-domain folk game.
To support his case, Anspach conducted extensive archival research and discovered Lizzie Magie’s 1904 U.S. patent No. 748,626. He also gathered testimony from students of Professor Nearing and from Quakers, helping establish a lineage showing that Darrow had copied a game he had played at a friend’s house. In 1979, Anspach won at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in 1983 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Parker Brothers’ appeal. According to the provided context, this legal struggle helped bring public recognition to the historical fact that Lizzie Magie was the true original creator of Monopoly.