Since 1994, Randy Cassingharn has run an online "funny news" service called THIS IS TRUE. Once a week, subscribers oil the Internet receive a digest of'weird news stones with his acerbic comments; he has also published several books of such collected tales.

In April of this year, Cassirigharn published a story that got him into trouble with one of his more - umm "doctrinaire" Christian readers, who condemned him to hell for blasphemy. Instead of getting mad, he got even lie developed ari idea he had been discussing with a Net associate and began producing "Get Out Of Hell Free" cards and selling them to readers of THIS IS TRUE for die cost of production and postage, ten for a dollar.

It Was a wildly popular item of course, and was even featured in the October 2000 issue of Playboy magazine. But this didn't prevent the Legions of the Humorless from horning in on the act. Despite the fact that the card is clearly marked "Parody: not affiliated with Hasbro's MONOPOLY in any fashion", it wasn't long before Hasbro's lawyers were on to him with a cease and desist order, claiming that the parody "creates a likelihood of confusion with respect to Hasbro's authorization or sponsorship or association with this commercial activities," and that the card "is not a protectible parody of Hasbro's MONOPOLY property trading game, because it does not comment on Hasbro's MONOPOLY property trading game in any way."

The ever-litigous nature of American society perhaps makes something like this inevitable. There are a lot of dense people out there, and some of them are lawyers, but this is pretty heavy-handed, don't you think? Hasbro, which is now about the only game publishing company in North America big enough to have a lunchroom (let alone things like lawyers and salaried employees), has demonstrated very territorial behavior with respect to both its standard cash-cow products like MONOPOLY and its recent acquisitions (i.e. the imbroglio between Hasbro, Multi-Man Publishing, Critical Hit and other companies over publishing material, official or otherwise, in support of the way of life that is Advanced Squad Leader-- for more on this, see Michael Dean's update on the state of the hobby in the May 2000 issue of Strategist.

Protection of copyright and other intellectual property rights is one thing, especially when money is involved, but there are established standards for parody that cover transparent, non-profit satires like Cassingham's cards.

A lot of readers have expressed support for Cassingham and asked about a boycott or letter-writing campaign, or about contributing to a legal defense fund. However, this isn't happening: he feels that Hasbro has said its piece and he has responded in good faith by putting a detailed disclaimer on the card and explaining clearly on his website that the card is a direct parody of MONOPOLY, so that should be the end of it. Meanwhile, we can but hope that this will be the list time the little buy gets leaned on by a big company with lots of lawyers and money to hand. (Har, har -ed.)

As of press date, the cards are still available: go to http://thisistrue.com/goohf.html to get the whole story of the cards and how to order them.

Brian Train probably needs a bushel basket of these things.