Amiga, Inc. is a company that used to hold some trademarks and other assets associated with the
Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
personal computer (originally developed by
Amiga Corporation
Amiga Corporation was a United States computer company formed in the early 1980s as Hi-Toro. It is most famous for having developed the Amiga computer, code named Lorraine.
History
In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari staffers, ...
).
Early years
In the early 1980s
Jay Miner, along with other
Atari, Inc.
Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari was a key player in the formation of the video arcade and video game industry.
Based primarily around the Sunny ...
staffers, set up another chip-set project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have some creative freedom. Atari, Inc.
went into contract with Amiga for licensed use of the chipset in a new high end game console and then later for use in a computer system.
[
] $500,000 was advanced to Amiga to continue development of the chipset.
[
] Amiga negotiated with
Commodore International two weeks prior to the contract deadline of 30 June 1984.
[
] In August 1984,
Atari Corporation, under
Jack Tramiel, sued Amiga for breach of contract. The case was settled in 1987 in a closed settlement.
[
] (See "
Amiga Corporation
Amiga Corporation was a United States computer company formed in the early 1980s as Hi-Toro. It is most famous for having developed the Amiga computer, code named Lorraine.
History
In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari staffers, ...
".)
In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by
Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who in turn went bankrupt in 1996. The Commodore-Amiga assets were then sold to another PC manufacturer,
Gateway 2000
Gateway, Inc., previously Gateway 2000, is an American computer hardware company. The company developed, manufactured, supported, and marketed a wide range of personal computers, computer monitors, servers, and computer accessories. It was acq ...
, which had announced grand plans for the Amiga. However, in 1999, Gateway sold the assets (except for the patents, which were only licensed) to Amino Development for almost 5 million dollars. Gateway still retained ownership to the Commodore-Amiga patents. The last of the Commodore-Amiga patents (EP0316325B1 for "Cursor controlled user interface system", based on US887053) expired on July 14, 2007.
Dispute and settlement with Hyperion
Amiga, Inc. licensed the rights to make hardware using the AmigaOne brand to a computer vendor based in the UK, Eyetech Group. However, due to poor sales Eyetech suffered substantial losses and ceased trading.
In 2007 Amiga, Inc. announced specs for a new line of Amiga computers: low end and high models. At the same time Amiga, Inc. sued Hyperion Entertainment, a company developing AmigaOS 4 for AmigaOne boards for trademark infringement in the Washington Western District Court in Seattle, USA. The company claimed Hyperion was in breach of contract, citing trademark violation and copyright infringement concerning the development and marketing of
AmigaOS 4.0.
Also in 2007, Amiga, Inc. intended to become the naming-rights sponsor for a planned
ice hockey
Ice hockey (or simply hockey) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice hock ...
arena in
Kent, Washington
Kent is a city in King County, Washington, United States. It is part of the Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue metropolitan area and had a population of 136,588 as of the 2020 census, making it the fourth-largest municipality in greater Seattle and t ...
, but failed to deliver a promised down payment.
Pentti Kouri, Chairman of the Board and a primary source of capital for Amiga, Inc., died in 2009.
On 20 September 2009 Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment reached a settlement where Hyperion is granted an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market
AmigaOS 4.x and subsequent versions of
AmigaOS (including AmigaOS 5).
Licensing rights
In 2010 Commodore USA announced they acquired the rights to the Amiga name and relaunch Amiga branded desktops running
AROS Aros may refer to:
*Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium
* Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland
*AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...
and Linux, which however
Hyperion Entertainment
Hyperion Entertainment CVBA (formerly Hyperion Entertainment VOF) is a Belgian software company which in its early years focused in porting Windows games to Amiga OS, Linux, and Mac OS. In 2001, they accepted a contract by Amiga Incorporated t ...
promptly disputed, on the basis of a 2009
settlement agreement
In law, a settlement is a resolution between disputing parties about a legal case, reached either before or after court action begins. A collective settlement is a settlement of multiple similar legal cases. The term also has other meanings in t ...
between Hyperion and Amiga Inc. After legal threats from Hyperion due to conditions in the Amiga Inc. settlement that they are now subject to as an Amiga licensee, Commodore USA later dropped their AROS plans and announced on their relaunched website, that they will create a new OS called AMIGA Workbench 5.0 (name changed to Commodore OS since Workbench was owned by
Cloanto), which was later revealed will be based on Linux.
In 2011, Amiga Inc. licensed the brand name to
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...
based manufacturer
IContain Systems, Ltd.
In 2012, Amiga Inc. completed the transfer of copyrights up to 1993 to Cloanto.
Recent events
Amiga Inc. is in dispute with Hyperion due to the release of Workbench 3.1.4 by Hyperion.
On 1 February 2019, Amiga Inc. transferred all its IP (including Amiga trademarks and remaining copyrights) to C-A Acquisition Corp., owned by Mike Battilana (director of Cloanto, company behind the
Amiga Forever
Amiga Forever is an Amiga preservation, emulation and support package published by Cloanto, which allows Amiga software to run on non-Amiga hardware legally and without complex configuration.
The Windows version of Amiga Forever includes a "pl ...
emulation package), later renamed to Amiga Corporation.
See also
*
Amiga, Inc. (South Dakota)
Amiga, Inc. of South Dakota was a personal computer company, originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Gateway 2000, Inc., predating the Amiga, Inc. of Washington. It was based upon the intellectual property of the German company Escom AG, and ...
*
Amiga Corporation
Amiga Corporation was a United States computer company formed in the early 1980s as Hi-Toro. It is most famous for having developed the Amiga computer, code named Lorraine.
History
In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari staffers, ...
*
Amiga computer
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
*
AmigaOne
AmigaOne is a series of computers intended to run AmigaOS 4 developed by Hyperion Entertainment, as a successor to the Amiga series by Commodore International. Earlier models were produced by Eyetech, and were based on the ''Teron'' series of Powe ...
*
AmigaOS 4
References
External links
Amiga, Inc. Website(Archive.org, October 2017)
*
{{AmigaOS 4
Amiga companies