Amiga, Inc. was a company run by Bill McEwen that used to hold some trademarks and other assets associated with the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

personal computer. The company has its origins in

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux language, Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state, state in the West North Central states, North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Dakota people, Dakota Sioux ...

–based Amiga, Inc., a subsidiary of Gateway 2000, of which McEwen was its marketing chief. Gateway 2000 sold the Amiga properties to McEwen's company Amino Development on December 31, 1999, which he later renamed to Amiga, Inc. The company sold the Amiga properties to Mike Battilana on February 1, 2019, under a new entity called Amiga Corporation.

Background

In the early 1980s

Jay Miner Jay Glenn Miner (May 31, 1932 – June 20, 1994) was an American integrated circuit designer, known primarily for developing graphics and audio chips for the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit computers and as the "father of the Amiga". Early life ...

, along with other Atari, Inc. 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 Commodore International Corporation was a home computer and electronics manufacturer with its head office in The Bahamas and its executive office in the United States founded in 1976 by Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. It was the successor compan ...

two weeks prior to the contract deadline of 30 June 1984. In August 1984,

Atari Corporation Atari Corporation was an American manufacturer of Home computer, home computers and Video game console, video game consoles. It was founded by Jack Tramiel on May 17, 1984, as Tramel Technology, Ltd., but then took on the Atari name less than ...

, under

Jack Tramiel Jack Tramiel (, ); born Idek Trzmiel (; December 13, 1928 – April 8, 2012) was a Polish- American businessman and Holocaust survivor, best known for founding Commodore International. The Commodore PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 are som ...

, sued Amiga for breach of contract. The case was settled in 1987 in a closed settlement. 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, 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

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

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arena in

Kent, Washington Kent is a city in King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington, United States. It is part of the Seattle metropolitan area, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue metropolitan area and had a population of 136,588 as of the 2020 Unit ...

, 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 September 20, 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 AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

(including AmigaOS 5). Later, Amiga Inc. was in another dispute with Hyperion due to the release of Workbench 3.1.4 by Hyperion. This was settled on 30 March 2023.

Licensing rights

Amiga, Inc. licensed the rights to make hardware using the

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. Unlike the original Amiga computers which used Motorola 68k processors, 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 2010 a Florida-based company calling itself Commodore USA, but lacking rights to the brand name, claimed they had acquired the rights to the Amiga name and would relaunch Amiga branded desktops running AROS and Linux.

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 ...

promptly disputed this, on the basis of a 2009 settlement agreement between Hyperion and Amiga Inc. After legal threats from Hyperion, Commodore USA dropped their AROS plans, claimed they would create a new Linux-based OS called AMIGA Workbench 5.0 (later changed to Commodore OS since Workbench was owned by Cloanto), and shut down in 2012. In 2011, Amiga Inc. licensed the brand name to

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

based manufacturer IContain Systems, Ltd. In 2012, Amiga Inc. completed the transfer of copyrights up to 1993 to Cloanto.

Recent events

On February 1, 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 emulation package), later renamed to Amiga Corporation.

References

External links