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US Company Buys Commodore Brand For $33 Million
inKubus writes "Tulip Computers International BV -- which has held the rights to Commodore since 1997 -- said Thursday it will sell the once-mighty Commodore computer brand to U.S.-based Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc. for 24 million euros, or $33 million. A company spokesman said they would "take actions" against possible copyright infringements of the Commodore name in the United States as well as release a new MP3 player and rerelease classic games."
There is a major problem with people swapping tape cartridges full of programs. Somebody needs to fight these pirates.
Another Canadian icon to the US attack-lawyers.
A group of investors actually wants the name associated with a company whose business strategy was best summed up as:
Ready
Fire!
Aim
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...abandonware isn't really abandonware. Now, I'm wondering if they bought the name just so they could make money out of lawsuits. If they do, and it works, I wonder how many other companies will attempt to by rights to long and outdated software just to attempt to raise their bottom line by sueing everyone.
a 6502-based MP3 player! (Or is that 6210?) Whichever, the "Commodore name" to most people isn't a modern-centric concept. It's a historical relic (an important one, sure, but has no basis in modern computing).
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
rerelease classic games."
I wonder if this means we'll get C64 games on those little joystick-that-plugs-into-the-tv things that are so popular nowadays.
I mean, really, it's pretty much been empty promises since about 1992 from the Commodore/Amiga crowd, and the Commodore kicked the bucket.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
A company whose primary product seems (from their website) to be a DRM scheme is buying the commodore brand - remember, this is the company that gave out schematics with their computers. Doesn't sound like it makes sense to me. The only people who care about C= are geeks who will know better...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps they could release a kit commodore as well, it has been a long time since beginners to computing could sit down and build their own computer from the chips up. Be a great learning tool to see again... Or, I could take the 6502 and finish work that bending robot in the garage...
Is this really a US company ? Looks like a EU company or did I miss something ?
Sports & Events
E-mail: info@yeahronimo.com
Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc.
Ms. Roxanne Pons
Public Relations
Tel: +31 35 543 05 07
E-mail: press@yeahronimo.com
Company Address Europe (Operational Offices)
Hermesweg 15
3741 GP BAARN
The Netherlands
Company Address USA
Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc
433 N. Camden Dr., Suite 600
Beverly Hills, Ca. 90210 USA
Phone: +1 213 379 0540
Fax: +1 310 362 8608
It was all they could get... names already taken were:
Geronimo
Jironimo
Ghironimo
Geeronimo
Goshronimo
and
Gollyronimo
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Would the Commodore name have that value today if it wasn't for all the C-64/Amiga User Groups that kept the legacy alive for all these years? These are the same people that will get sued first, I'm willing to bet.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Names can't be copyrighted...they'd be taking action against uses of the name under TRADEMARK law.
There are a couple of issues they might run into:
1) continuous use -- has the trademark been in continuous use over the years? They can't just abandon it and pick it back up
2) passing off - if no one else is "passing themselves off" as the Commodore computer company, they probably don't have an action.
overall, if their investment plan is litigation, i think they are in a craptacular situation
Better than GORF, Radar Rat Race, or Lock N Chase?
How dare you.
I remember when a bunch of my friends had Vic 20s, and I wished I had one.
Then for christmas, lo and behold, there's what looks like a Vic 20! Hooray, I rushed over, red-cheeked with excitement. Commodore 64?! What the fuck is that! I had one from the very first shipment to Canada. There was nowhere to get software for it in my area.
I was bummed, and all my friends mocked my useless PC.. Until a few months later my old man took me to the World of Commodore show, where I picked up a Choplifter! cartridge. Then it was: "WHOS LAUGHING NOW, BITCHES!".
I swear I had like 20 kids coming to my house at a time to play it. It just blew away anything we'd seen before, back in the age of Atari's and Colecos.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The Commodor 64 had 64k of RAM. the 20K of system rom was "over" the last 20K of RAM, and the 16K of RAM before that could be banked out so a Cartridge ROM could reside there. The 6510 had the ability to look at several address in zero page memory and use that information to "bank" certain ROM and memory mampped I/O out so that the RAM underneith could be used.
vi +
The question is, "would you care?"
The people most likely to care are those who *know* the situation, your hypothetical 30-year old Joe Sixpack might get nostalgic about his old C64 or Amiga, but realistically, C= is a company from the past and doesn't have that much cachet nowadays.
I don't think Commodore t-shirts will ever be fashionable in the way that Atari t-shirts became a couple of years back.
Actually, the one thing that pisses me off about the Atari 'resurrection' is the gratuitous changing of the logo. The original was an absolute design classic; either the fuji on its own, or with the fuji and 'ATARI' name underneath.
Hasbro did their own stupid variant when they owned it, now Infogrames have decided to alter the fuji itself (UGLY!), then stick it in the middle of the 'ATARI' name (where it loses impact, IMHO).
The best reason I can think of for doing this is some tosser of a design consultant justifying his fee. Scum.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
If you look at Yeahronimo's website, there's talk about selling ringtones and realtones (presumably for cellphones).
Maybe they want to make a C64 emulator for cellphones and sell/rent old C64 games to cellphone customers.
Commodore was started in Canada, and stayed alive because of a Canadian investor, but a "Canadian Icon"? By the time it reached prominence in the PC industry with the VIC20 and C64 it was only Canadian in a nominal sense. Also something to keep in mind is that the corporate behaviour of some of the early Commodore bigwigs would make an Enron executive blush.
Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel, who was a Polish-born American citizen, established Commodore in Canada to circumvent stricter import/export regulations in the US (some of Commodore's early office products and parts were imported from eastern Europe and relations between US and nations within the Soviet sphere of influence were obviously cooling). Co-founder CP Morgan might've been Canadian but I'm not sure. In any case, CP Morgan's company went bankrupt and the SEC thoroughly investigated Morgan for less-than-honest conduct. Later, Canadian Irving Gould invested in Commodore and kept it alive, but he was ultimately responsible for ousting Jack in the 80s. Gould was also noted for his not-quite-honest business practises. If I recall, Commodore International was incorporated offshore to avoid taxation, although the physical offices were in Canada.
So....the "Canadian Icon" Commodore was founded by an American Citizen (a remarkable one who survived Auchwitz and had quite an acumen for business, but not Canadian) and incorporated offshore. The early Canadian investor (Morgan) had a minority stake and went bankrupt and nearly pulled Tramiel into a legal quagmire with his corporate hanky-panky. The next Canadian that stepped into the picture (Gould) outed the founder and let Jack take some of Commodore's best people with him over to Atari, then subsequently squandered the prize they snatched from Jack at Atari (the Amiga--which was a fantastic machine that was mismanaged into the ground).
Since the Bankruptcy, what was left of Commodore never came back to Canada--it existed solely in Europe.
As a Canadian myself, I think I'd find another Icon to be proud of.
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