It's amazing some obsessive retro enthusiast has gone to the effort to assemble such a huge archive of old legal documents. So... nice job.
Having been deeply involved in the Amiga community from 1985 to 1995 and knowing lots of people at Commodore as well as many of the largest Amiga developers and even attending most of the Amiga trade shows around the world starting with the first Amiga Expo in NY - it's safe to say I really liked the Amiga and still revere it's historical legacy. It was an incredible platform that was ahead of its time. I have so many fond memories of good times with good people.
However, having said that. I have to add that it's beyond bizarre grown adults are still squabbling in court over legal rights to the Amiga IP and trademarks more than 30 years after the Amiga died. I guess one could argue that maybe the Amiga IP and trademarks still had some potential value that could have been extracted before the year 2000, but certainly after 2000 none of it has any serious value. To be clear, I'm a business person with decades of experience as a senior executive in the non-Amiga technology industry, including at Fortune 500 tech companies whose products most people reading this probably use every week. So when I say "no serious value", I mean the maximum value of all these rights combined - when rounded to the nearest million dollars - is zero. And that includes my best guess of the combined value of all future revenue, from Amiga Forever, to accelerator cards, to FPGA emulators, to nostalgia-ware T-shirts. At best, all of it doesn't add up to more than a garage Etsy or EBay-sized part-time business. And year by year, it's getting even smaller.
What are these people even thinking? They are wasting time and money paying lawyers to fight over essentially worthless scraps. It's insane. I acknowledge that maybe it's just one crazy person (or group) causing all this pointless bickering but, eventually, even the sane people bear some responsibility for continuing to respond to it. Yes, the Amiga was great. Yes, it would be nice to support the retro community and open source the code for posterity. But, at some point, you need to concede it's just not possible, give up and move on to do things more useful than fighting with crazy people. It's sad but life is short. You tried. Thanks. Now save yourself from any more of this silliness.
Granted, there's no value in the US, but it seems to be European entities driving all the friction -- is it possible the retro Amiga market is actually valuable (it's still not gonna make you rich, but…)) in the EU?
I don't think so but... maybe? I guess there's no real data, so no way to know except guesswork estimates.
The entire retro market around all Amiga related things is larger, including people releasing modern games, but owning the rights to monetize the original Amiga IP is much smaller than the overall interest in Amiga. And even new Amiga games are almost all shareware, freeware or Patreon-supported, not a real commercial software model. I think the Amiga IP at this point is just down to:
* Getting royalties on licensing ROMs for distribution to retro enthusiasts (like Cloanto's Amiga Forever) or PowerPC derivatives born long after Commodore's demise (which are just a new and different thing from OG Amiga).
* Licensing the Amiga logo and name for T-shirts, mouse pads or if someone makes an Amiga recreation.
Any patents would be long expired at this point. So, I'm guessing maybe a few thousand dollars a month? Even that may be optimistic. The ROMs have been widely available from unofficial sources forever. I suppose you could try to leverage owning the Amiga name into adjacent businesses marketing new products to the retro-interested base but that still requires making new products, spending money to market them and profitably selling them. None of which is included in owning the old Amiga IP rights. I just can't see how it's really worth much.
Having been deeply involved in the Amiga community from 1985 to 1995 and knowing lots of people at Commodore as well as many of the largest Amiga developers and even attending most of the Amiga trade shows around the world starting with the first Amiga Expo in NY - it's safe to say I really liked the Amiga and still revere it's historical legacy. It was an incredible platform that was ahead of its time. I have so many fond memories of good times with good people.
However, having said that. I have to add that it's beyond bizarre grown adults are still squabbling in court over legal rights to the Amiga IP and trademarks more than 30 years after the Amiga died. I guess one could argue that maybe the Amiga IP and trademarks still had some potential value that could have been extracted before the year 2000, but certainly after 2000 none of it has any serious value. To be clear, I'm a business person with decades of experience as a senior executive in the non-Amiga technology industry, including at Fortune 500 tech companies whose products most people reading this probably use every week. So when I say "no serious value", I mean the maximum value of all these rights combined - when rounded to the nearest million dollars - is zero. And that includes my best guess of the combined value of all future revenue, from Amiga Forever, to accelerator cards, to FPGA emulators, to nostalgia-ware T-shirts. At best, all of it doesn't add up to more than a garage Etsy or EBay-sized part-time business. And year by year, it's getting even smaller.
What are these people even thinking? They are wasting time and money paying lawyers to fight over essentially worthless scraps. It's insane. I acknowledge that maybe it's just one crazy person (or group) causing all this pointless bickering but, eventually, even the sane people bear some responsibility for continuing to respond to it. Yes, the Amiga was great. Yes, it would be nice to support the retro community and open source the code for posterity. But, at some point, you need to concede it's just not possible, give up and move on to do things more useful than fighting with crazy people. It's sad but life is short. You tried. Thanks. Now save yourself from any more of this silliness.
The entire retro market around all Amiga related things is larger, including people releasing modern games, but owning the rights to monetize the original Amiga IP is much smaller than the overall interest in Amiga. And even new Amiga games are almost all shareware, freeware or Patreon-supported, not a real commercial software model. I think the Amiga IP at this point is just down to:
* Getting royalties on licensing ROMs for distribution to retro enthusiasts (like Cloanto's Amiga Forever) or PowerPC derivatives born long after Commodore's demise (which are just a new and different thing from OG Amiga).
* Licensing the Amiga logo and name for T-shirts, mouse pads or if someone makes an Amiga recreation.
Any patents would be long expired at this point. So, I'm guessing maybe a few thousand dollars a month? Even that may be optimistic. The ROMs have been widely available from unofficial sources forever. I suppose you could try to leverage owning the Amiga name into adjacent businesses marketing new products to the retro-interested base but that still requires making new products, spending money to market them and profitably selling them. None of which is included in owning the old Amiga IP rights. I just can't see how it's really worth much.