Who owns the IP for the CBM machine ROMs PET/VIC/64?

[beamrider]

As far as I can find out Commodore International was sold to Gateway (who sold rights to the Amiga IP only), then Gateway was aquired by Acer.

So I'm guessing theoretically it is still Acer - please correct me if I am wrong...

[cbmeeks]

One way to find out is to start selling them. First one to send out a cease and desist will probably be the owner.

LOL!!

Of course, I am joking. But in all seriousness, that is a good question. My guess is that whomever owns the trademark "Commodore" probably owns the ROM's. However, I'm certainly no lawyer.

[tokra]

CommodoreCorp owns the trademark, see http://www.commodorecorp.com - the site is nearly unusable, but Jens Schoenfeld of ICOMP actually managed to get hold of them and licensed the Commdore-logo for the C64C-cases he produced last year.

The software-right (ROMs) and such are claimed to be held by Cloanto (who do C64Forever and AmigaForever), see here:
https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-02-00027-EN.html

The legality of the claim has been doubted on the forums if I remember correctly, but this is an issue only a competent copyright lawyer could maybe untangle, but it might be the more economic solution just to license from Cloanto instead of paying a lawyer to confirm or deny this or just go ahead without a license and be sued.

[groepaz]

regarding the C64 ROMs there is another twist - while cloanto happily collects license fees for them, these are NOT in the (rather long) list of stuff they registered at the US copyright office. (the 1541 ROM _IS_ in the list though). that makes me doubt even more - because if they actually had those rights, why would they forget about those roms in the list they are registering?

[cbmeeks]

Ugh. A little OT but I personally think these patent trolls are WORSE than the software "pirates".

[Kakemoms]

Microsoft holds the right to Commodore Basic. They sold a perpetual license to them, but I doubt they sold the right to license these out.

[malcontent]

Yes copyright hawks are nasty. I admin a website that hosts game world files for an old DOS program called ZZT, and we've gotten multiple (albeit ignorable) C&D's from Nintendo, EA, etc., cause some 12 year old made a "Mario" game 20 years ago and we have Mario.zip on the server so some bot flags us and sends an automated threat.