17.Apr.2017
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Amiga Inc. loses US trademark, new registrations from Cloanto and Hyperion
For years, Amiga, Inc. has been losing registered trademarks (examples: 1, 2) since expiring registrations were not renewed in time - but so far, only duplicate registrations or less important marks ("powered by Amiga") had been affected. On December 31 the final deadline for extending the registration of the only remaining US "Amiga" trademark expired: for a short period of time, the term was not a registered mark in the United States.
It looks like Italian software developer Cloanto, who acquired most of the Amiga copyrights in 2012, has been following these developments closely: On January 2 - i.e. the first working day after Amiga, Inc's trademark expired - Cloanto
applied for the "Amiga" trademark. The company already owns the registered US marks "Workbench" and "Amiga Forever".
It seems that Hyperion was not as alert: It took them until February to apply for their own marks. According to the information available so far, Hyperion did not try to dispute Cloanto's application for the "Amiga" mark, the Belgium company responsible for AmigaOS 4 applied for AmigaOS, BoingBall and AmigaOne. These trademarks, which had not or no longer been registered before, were originally licensed to Hyperion in the 2009 settlement agreement with Amiga, Inc. - apparently Hyperion's management operates under the assumption that Amiga, Inc. will be unable or uninterested in defending these marks after losing the more important "Amiga" mark.
After losing the US Amiga mark, the most important trademark registration still owned by Amiga, Inc. (list of US and European Amiga marks) is probably the registration of the "AMIGA" trademark with the European Intellectual Property Office, which expires in May 2018. This registration covers all of Europe, including countries like Germany or the UK - where the local "Amiga" registrations have already expired aswell.
Note from the editor: In all public trademark databases, Amiga, Inc's original Amiga trademark is still listed as active - trademark offices usually take several months to update their databases once a mark expires. But the entry in the US Patent and Trademark Office's database (search for serial number 73571532) features a section labeled "TSDR" which has a "Documents" tab containing a list of submitted documents - the most recent one is dated 2006 - and a "Maintainance" tab offering a pretty definite statement regarding missing documents.
Update: (18.04.2017, 15:00, cg)
Hyperion has not only applied for the "AmigaOne" mark, it is also trying to register the "AmigaOS" mark and the BoingBall. (cg) (Translation: cg)
[News message: 17. Apr. 2017, 07:05] [Comments: 0]
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