amiga-news.de - Picasso96 conflict: Jens Schönfeld reacts to Cloanto's rebuttal

07.Mar.2019 Picasso96 conflict: Jens Schönfeld reacts to Cloanto's rebuttal
Jens Schönfeld (Individual Computers) has been publicly claiming (German) for quite a while that Cloanto (PersonalPaint, Amiga Forever) are distributing unlicensed copies of Picasso96. In an attempt to rebut these allegations, the Italian developer had published his documentation regarding the Picasso96 license for Amiga Forever two weeks ago.

Yesterday, Jens Schönfeld reacted to this move by adding an addendum to the Picasso96 press release on his company's website: He points to a section in the mails published by Cloanto where Mike Battilana from Cloanto and then P96-Owner Alexander Kneer agree on the phrase "licensed copy [...] without upgrade privileges" to describe Cloanto's license.

According to Mr. Schönfeld, this statement does not only refer to "upgrades" of Picasso96, but also to upgrades of Amiga Forever - meaning that the license would only be valid for the one Amiga Forever version that was available at the time the agreement was reached. He points out that the original P96 authors claimed there were no other licensees when selling the rights to the software to him - which he says confirms his point of view.

Today, a private e-mail from Jens Schönfeld was leaked to a dutch Amiga forum. In the message, he's telling the organisers of the Amiga34 event that he has to withdraw his offer to sponsor the event since (quote) "the legal confrontation with Cloanto is binding a lot of resources". He also states that he will "leave the market within the next 12 months" and that his stock and designs are for sale.

In a second message that was released later on, the German hardware developer confirms the authenticity of the leaked e-mail, but stresses that it was not meant to be released publically. He's also refining the statement regarding his exit from the Amiga scene somewhat, stating that he will "surely leave the market" should Cloanto "win a lawsuit" - but only in that case, apparently.

Notes from the staff:

The phrase "upgrade privileges" is pretty common in English licensing agreements, but in our experience always refers to just the software that is being licenced. As far as we can tell, using that phrase the way Mr. Schönfeld suggests it was used here would be a rather unorthodox approach.

Jens Schönfeld refers to "a lawsuit", that Cloanto might win. We are not aware of any lawsuits between Cloanto and Individual Computers and in late December the latter was still hoping (German) that his Italian adversary would "finally settle the whole thing in front of a court". This is why the remark is probably referring to the laswuit between Cloanto and Hyperion: Individual Computers is a Hyperion licensee and would be directly affected by a Hyperion defeat. (cg) (Translation: cg)

[News message: 07. Mar. 2019, 22:58] [Comments: 0]
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