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From: kmo@ptsfa.UUCP (Ken Olsen)
Newsgroups: net.games.trivia
Subject: Re: Trivial Pursuit inventors being sued
Message-ID: <341@ptsfa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 29-Oct-84 13:50:53 EST
Article-I.D.: ptsfa.341
Posted: Mon Oct 29 13:50:53 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Oct-84 06:14:07 EST
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> *** REPLACE YOUR MESSAGE WITH THIS LINE ***  :-)
> 
> Yesterday (10/25) I heard that the inventors of Trivial Pursuit, Horn Abbot 
> Ltd. (of Ontario, Canada) were being sued by someone who had written two
> trivia books a few years ago.  The man's name escapes me now, but I believe
> he lives around the Los Angeles area.  He claims that he had an intentionally
> wrong answer in the book, along with some misspellings, which had appeared
> in the game.  The lawsuit amount, if I remember correctly, was $300 million.
> (Sigh....everyone wants to get in on the action.)
> 

The man sueing the Trivial Pursuit people is Fred L. Worth, author of two
of the most popular trivia books written.  The first was written around
1972, and the second, 1979-80.  There were misspellings and inaccuracies
in his books which he claims made it into Trivial Pursuit.
	I respect Mr. Worth for his books (in school, when only the first
book was around, we often spent bus/car trips asking each other questions
from it), but I've played Trivial Pursuit  *many* times (all but the Sports
Edition), and I have only seen *maybe* a half a dozen questions which made
me think of his books.  (For example, "What is a triskadecaphobic?".***)  I find
it hard to believe that the makers of Trivial Pursuit used them as a *major*
source.   I guess we wait to see how far the suit goes...

Ken Olsen
{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!kmo

(***triskadecaphobic: Someone with an irrational fear of the number 13.)