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 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 1982 In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari sta ...

), 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. In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom (computer company), 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 ice hockey arena in Kent, Washington, 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, AmigaOS 4.x and subsequent versions of AmigaOS (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 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 promptly disputed this, on the basis of a 2009 History of the AmigaOS 4 dispute, 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 based manufacturer IContain Systems, 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

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