Licensing Kickstart ROMs for Raspberry Pi

[cgutjahr]

Do you believe they own the copyright, or do they just have a license?

Okay, I'll try to sum it up for you (believe it or not, the following summary is the simplified version):

There is only one entity that claims to own the Kickstart ROMs (amongst other things): Amiga Inc., available (sometimes) at amiga.com. There are several problems though:

1. They licensed most of the rights regarding the Kickstarts, including the right to distribute them in anything but simple emulator-autostarting-a-single-game packages or Amiga-in-a-joystick type hardware, to another entity exclusively: Hyperion Entertainment. Both parties hate each other with a vengeance, and neither trusts the agreement between them (which is available here) or intends to abide by the rules defined in it. You could ask Hyperion for a license, but they're probably just waiting for some idiot who's testing if Amiga Inc. can still pay its lawyers.

2. In an effort to avoid paying taxes, landlords and former employees or partners, Amiga Inc. moved, restructered and renamed itself half a dozen times in the last decade. At the end, nobody cared enough to bring them down, but you won't find many people who wouldn't agree that some really shady stuff has been going on. Even if they did own the IP in question at one point in time, it would probably be easy to finish them off for good. And that's not even counting the paperwork for all these IP transfers and sales, which is a horrible mess (we know, because it was documented in a court case).

3. Nobody knows, if Amiga Inc. ever owned the Kickstart ROMs. They allegedly bought them from Gateway, who allegedly bought them from the bancrupt ESCOM in 1997, who had allegedly acquired them when buying the bancrupt Commodore in 1995. But in 1997, a German judge ruled that ESCOM didn't provide any paperwork that proved they acquired the Kickstart rights along with the trademarks etc. That doesn't mean they didn't have such paperwork lying around somewhere (the company was long defunct when the judge made his decision), but it was only halfheartedly fixed during the sale to Gateway a few months later.

Basically, you will probably have to contact Hyperion, or maybe Amiga Inc. (depending on the exact use for the ROMs you have in mind, see the agreement). If you contact the latter, don't expect an answer unless you promise to provide tons of money or to hurt Hyperion real bad. If you contact the former, expect paranoia and greed, and make sure you don't mind being used as a guinea pig.

Your best bet might be the effort to create free ROMs using the open source AmigaOS clone AROS. Not there yet, but they're getting closer.

[cgutjahr]

So it would seem that the ROMs are the property of AsiaRIM or who ever owns Commodore rights and that both AI and Hyperion are pirates...

No. Asiarim (who might or might not own the Commodore trademark) belongs to the 2nd string of companies more or less inheriting ESCOM (one string for the Amiga stuff, one string for the rest of the Commodore IP).

If ESCOM owned the Kickstart ROMs, they were transfered to Gateway. If ESCOM didn't own the ROMs, they certainly didn't end up with Tulip/Yeahronimo/Asiarim.

[cgutjahr]

If Escom didn't get the rights then they remained with the rump of Commodore, which eventually went the Asiarim route.

There's no direct connection between Commodore and Asiarim. Whatever Asiarim bought (they didn't actually buy it, long story) came from Yeahronimo, who bought it from Tulip, who bought it from... ESCOM. If ESCOM didn't own the Kickstart rights, there's no way Asiarim could own them.

The copyright went one way or the other, it didn't remain in limbo.

Exactly, but for a start we don't know if ESCOM owned the rights or not - and if they didn't we don't know who does. Way too early to run out there and label people thiefs or a pirates.

[cgutjahr]

When they sold off Commodore how did they do it?  The whole thing or bits and pieces?

You're looking for easy answers, but usually there are no easy answers.

That said, ESCOM did buy "the whole thing", i.e. the parent company Commodore International, and of course they (and with them, the rest of the world) thought they owned the Kickstart ROMs. If there's no paperwork to prove that, it's just a management screw-up, not the ultimate proof that everybody lied to us for a decade and a half (well, they lied to us - but not about that )

Besides, you really need to get the idea out of your head that there's a knight in shiny armour waiting somewhere to come out of hiding and rescue AmigaOS. If you manage to take away the Kickstart ROMS from ESCOM and its successors (which means another lawsuit which is going to drag on for years), there's just going to be a new owner who wants to make money with his new baby. And if there's one thing we don't need after 18 years, it's yet another owner trying to make money.

[cgutjahr]

Did you forget about Cloanto's license?  So much for exclusively.

No I didn't. If the original poster is legit, he's searching for a way to distribute Kickstart ROMs with/for the Raspberry Pi. Distributing an emulator package on DVD is probably not what he has in mind - but that's all Cloanto have to offer.

And please don't get nervous that CUSA might not be able to distribute proper ROMs. They're not going to do that, ever. They wouldn't even know legit ROMs if they bit them in the ass. You may keep daydreaming about it as much as you want, but it's not going to happen. Period.

[cgutjahr]

Like Cloanto can't make a deal for the kickstart images alone.

They haven't done so for the last fifteen years they've been selling Amiga Forever - draw your own conclusions.

Like I would expect you to know jack on what C=USA's contractual options are?

I know Barry.

Possible conclusion

Look, I'm not happy about the situation as it is - but ESCOM did buy the rights, I have no doubt about it (and neither did they, or anybody else in the community - until recently). Heck, they bought the whole company. Even if there is a hole in the paperwork (which is not proven by the outcome of the lawsuit in Germany), trying to use that against any ESCOM follow-ups would just be as petty and miserable as the performance of said ESCOM follow-ups.

And AmigaOS still wouldn't be "free", there would still be an owner, and he would still be as dumb and greedy as all other owners have been.

[cgutjahr]

Dunno. There was one that contacted Pluritas about buying the IP.

As you said, he didn't end up as an owner - and I agree: go figure

But in this hypothetical scenario, we're talking about a guy who's searching for a legal loophole, forces another entity that thinks it has rightfully obtained some IP into a lawsuit and simply steals the IP from them.

Oh wait, that's not hypothetical at all... But still, that is the kind of person who would end up owning AmigaOS. I'm not sure that would be an improvement.

[cgutjahr]

There should be no Amiga Patents left, they only last for 17 years...

The USPTO has a nice searchable patent database (use "quick search" then search for "Assignee name" = Commodore). The list of results is sorted chronologically. start at the bottom and then go up the list.

For somewhat complicated reasons, the patents in question expire either 17 years after the issue date or 20 years after the filing date - whatever is the longer term. I count 6 patents which are still active, all of which will expire in the next year.

[cgutjahr]

No patents have matched your query

go to the patent database, click on "quick search", enter "commodore" (without the quotes) in the first search field (labeled "Term 1"), switch the associated drop down gadget (labeled "in Field 1") to "Assignee Name", then click on search - voila, 64 hits.

Note that there are more hits than fit on one page. Use the "next list"/"previous list" buttons to go next/previous page.