Citing hundreds of documents, this site contains mostly facts, but also a little bit of opinion. Most importantly, it tries to introduce the reader who may not be familiar with "Amiga" into a perspective of things that would otherwise be difficult to grasp by just reading what various Amiga-named or lawyer-controlled companies tried to convey, or with a momentary glimpse at some forum discussions. The latter is made especially difficult because a small yet loud-voiced community of Amiga users, with its almost religious fervor, isolation and nostalgic attachment to their old Amiga systems, has become an unsuspecting accomplice in depicting a semblance of Amiga-related activity that does not reflect objective financial or technology metrics.

The original motivation behind "Amiga Documents" was to expose the rift that was running between the high hopes of the Amiga community and a toxic combination of leadership and ownership that started in 1999, and which ended only 20 years later, when longtime Amiga developer Cloanto purchased the remaining Amiga assets [277]. We intend to continue to watch and document this new chapter that started in 2019, especially as a litigious lawyer-controlled Hyperion Entertainment remains a constant and expensive peril to the dynamics that might otherwise drive the Amiga world and its technical and economic development.

We trust that you will be able to recognize connections and inconsistencies as they are exposed. Kindly report errors and omissions (an email address appears at the end of the text). Also on Twitter @amigadocuments.

Please note: facts were referenced wherever possible. Everything else is personal opinion only!

1982-1987: From Amiga Corporation to Commodore

• Amiga Corporation (main entity, founded 1982, dissolved 1987) [247]
• Amiga International (founded 1983, merged out 1984) [250]
• Amiga Computer, Inc. (founded 1983, merged out 1984) [251]
  

1994-1998: From Commodore-Amiga to ESCOM to Gateway

On April 27, 1994, the core group of companies behind the once glorious Commodore and Amiga computers filed for voluntary liquidation.

The liquidation of multiple Commodore-Amiga companies was jointly administered by different bankruptcy courts in a way that set international precedents [215]. On April 20, 1995, after a number of iterations, and bidding in agreement and with the backing of some Asian companies, ESCOM AG (Germany) placed the winning bid for the assets of the Commodore-Amiga companies. Said assets specifically included [231] "all the right, title and interest of the Commodore Entities to substantially all of their intellectual property, including technology, trademarks (including Commodore's logo and the names "Amiga" and "Commodore"), patents, copyrights, and know-how..." The same Asian companies who had backed ESCOM in return received certain non-exclusive rights (including that to publish the Amiga operating system) over certain Asian territories [7].

ESCOM itself initiated bankruptcy proceedings in 1996. Between March and September 1997 ESCOM sold to Gateway 2000, Inc. (which later changed name to Gateway, Inc.) all Commodore-Amiga assets (patents, copyrights, trademarks, domain names, etc.) except for the "C= Commodore" trademarks, which were first licensed [226] to former Commodore distributor [228] RULAG Werner Hirschmann KG and then sold to IBM-compatible PC maker Tulip Computers NV (Netherlands, formerly Compudata).

In July 1997, intersecting Gateway's acquisition of the assets from ESCOM, a German appeals court (Oberlandesgericht Celle, judgment 13 U 97/97) had to decide whether to grant a preliminary injunction to immediately stop sales by Amiga OS 3.1 vendor Village Tronic Marketing GmbH. After a review that included some contracts between the "Commodore-Amiga Group" and ESCOM AG covering the transfer of intellectual property [199] between Commodore-Amiga and ESCOM, the court noted [72][73][14] that no evidence had been provided about a transfer of the Amiga OS 3.1 copyrights to ESCOM. Gateway officers later stated that, in the transition from ESCOM, Gateway did not have the time to prepare for the court case and file supportive evidence. Overall, the case revolved around a payment dispute between ESCOM and Village Tronic, who ultimately lost the case and stopped selling Amiga OS 3.1.

In 1998, five months after the assignment of the trademarks was completed [222], ESCOM's trustee Mr. Bernhard Hembach signed three contracts [205][206][207] that first assigned all the copyrights of the late Commodore Business Machines, Inc. (Delaware) [208] and Commodore-Amiga, Inc. (California) [204] to ESCOM, and then transferred the same again to Gateway's Amiga company. On November 3, 1998, Mr. Bernhard Hembach signed the three contracts on behalf of all parties, as recorded at the US Copyright Office [203].

According to these documents, with three signatures by one and the same person (a recurring pattern in "Amiga" matters), and for the total amount of three US dollars, the Commodore-Amiga copyrights changed hands twice on the same day. While it may appear unusual to a layperson, we later learned that it is common practice to make copyright assignments using separate short contracts and small monetary amounts in order to maintain the more complex agreements and figures private (whereas the copyright records become public).

1998-1999: Gateway Keeps Patents, Sells Rest

In 1998 Mr. Bill McEwen (full legal name William Wallace McEwen XVI) [6] was hired as an independent subcontractor by "Amiga, Inc." (South Dakota) [221][2], a company owned by Gateway 2000, Inc.

Those were the days when there was a lot of excitement around the Internet, and the dot-com bubble was about to reach its peak. While the Amiga was already considered dead by many of its former insiders and technology leaders, it still had a loyal community of fans. These Amiga users were becoming increasingly vocal as they were desperate for new hardware and software announcements, also sensing the pressure of isolation from mainstream IT trends. In many ways, Amiga fans were "believers" like Mac fans, except that Amiga fans, sitting in front of their aging computers, also had good reasons to feel abandoned, betrayed, and perhaps a bit confused and alienated in a computing world that was changing without them.

Many of these Amiga enthusiasts attended the Computer '98 show in Cologne, Germany (one of Amiga's largest markets), in November 1998, where Gateway would represent the final hope of a new beginning. Mr. Bill McEwen attended too, and was impressed: he neither expected to find so many people at an Amiga gathering, nor did he imagine that they would treat anyone associated with Gateway like a demigod.

By 1999, as Gateway believed that there was little value [15] beyond the Commodore patents that it had acquired, an again jobless Mr. Bill McEwen found some investors to help acquire certain rights from Gateway. As part of this transaction, Gateway retained (but licensed to Mr. Bill McEwen's company) the patents, and assigned (transferred) the Amiga trademark registrations, the Commodore-Amiga copyrights and the amiga.com domain to the newly formed company, which was again called "Amiga, Inc." (Washington) [3]. The two initial funding sources [6] were Mr. Pentti Kouri's [8] Invisible Hand LLC and Mr. Ruud Veltenaar's Net Ventures BV in the Netherlands. The two were also joint investors in other companies, for example Digital Ink, Inc. [9]. Other notable investors were rumored to include a co-founder of Cable News Network (CNN), and a European central banker.

Gateway 2000, Inc. formally became Gateway, Inc. in 1999. The last of the Amiga patents expired in 2005. Gateway, Inc. was sold to Acer Inc. (Taiwan) in 2007.

1999-2018: A Chapter Worth Forgetting?

Hyperion Entertainment and the "Robbery of the AmigaOS"

Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment CVBA (formerly Hyperion Entertainment VOF), was founded by lawyer Mr. Ben Hermans (full legal name Benjamin Hermans), who was also the managing partner and later a director, and engineer Mr. Evert Carton in 1999. Mr. Evert Carton would later distance himself from the company. Current ownership details do not appear to be public record, but multiple sources indicated that as of June 2019 Mr. Ben Hermans was the almost sole proprietor, with a 96.88% stake [285].

Between 2003 and 2019, Mr. Ben Hermans was also an associate partner at Brussels firm Monard Law [252]. After allegations of incompatibility between the legal profession and the director role in Hyperion Entertainment were raised, the CEO title was handed over to Mr. Timothy De Groote at the end of 2016 [255]. In June 2019, following further allegations of incompatibility and even fraudulent actions [281], it became known that Mr. Ben Hermans was "fired from Monard Law" [284].

Mr. Timothy De Groote is employed as a slaughterhouse cleaner and warehouse worker [254], and is also a local board member of Vlaams Belang, a right-wing populist and Flemish nationalist political party [253][256].

While Hyperion Entertainment never employed any software developers (or ever had any employees whatsoever), the legal competencies at its core allowed it to conclude licensing agreements to port existing games to different platforms (e.g. from Windows to Amiga), and to outsource such porting work. Hyperion Entertainment was, thus, a "contract house".

Between October [131] and November [132] 2001, Hyperion Entertainment entered into an agreement with Amiga Washington to port the "Classic" Amiga OS 3.1 (or 3.9, according to a possibility laid out in the original plan) from the 68K CPU (as in the original 1985 Amiga) to the increasingly popular PowerPC CPU, which was already used in some newer Amiga expansion boards and in computers by Apple. Mr. Ben Hermans and Mr. Evert Carton both had other full-time jobs (Mr. Ben Hermans as an attorney), and would subcontract the work to external programmers, most notably the Frieden brothers in Germany.

According to the contract [132], the conversion was expected to be fairly simple both in terms of budget ($25,000), specification ("Essentially, OS 3.9 running on the AmigaOne and CyberStorm PPC without using the 68k CPU") and timing ("ready for release in a matter of months"). Mr. Ben Hermans himself illustrated how simple the port was expected to be in a "change some flags and recompile" comment [271]. Everything non-essential was grouped into a different section titled Future Work: "It is clear that the primary concern should be to get OS 4 up and running on both the AmigaOne as well as the CyberStorm PPC cards as soon as possible. After the basic work is done, further updates and goodies may be made available as boing bag upgrades on the road to OS 4.2."

Once it had received the $25,000, Hyperion Entertainment was supposed to "transfer all Source Code, interest and title in OS 4.0 to Amiga [Washington]", while continuing to pay Amiga Washington royalties for any sales of OS 4.0. Instead, Hyperion Entertainment claimed to only have received $24,750, i.e. $250 less than the agreed amount, whereas Amiga Washington claimed to have paid "far more than the prescribed $25,000 payment for that transfer" [243]. In other words, "Some five years after that due date had passed, and despite the fact that it has been paid 150% of the amount stipulated in its agreement with Amiga Washington relating to OS 4.0, Hyperion has not delivered the operating system to anyone – not to Amiga Washington and not to Amiga [Delaware], which by 2004 had acquired all right, title and interest in OS 4.0." [243]

In a series of aggressive escalations, what had started as a clerical $250 error even according to Hyperion Entertainment, evolved into a complex lawsuit coordinated by Mr. Ben Hermans acting as attorney of his own company and funded [239] by British oil millionaire [232] Mr. Robert Trevor Dickinson.

After the death of Mr. Pentti Kouri (main investor and chairman of the board of Amiga, Inc.) in 2009, the Amiga parties, represented by law firm Reed Smith, preferred to settle the matter [138]. The "robbery of the AmigaOS" [239] was thus complete, leaving Hyperion Entertainment with both the payment for the porting job and a royalty-free de facto ownership of AmigaOS 4 (the OS kernel and other components are owned by third parties close to Hyperion Entertainment), rather than a mere license, and Mr. Robert Trevor Dickinson's A-EON Technology Ltd., among others, with a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty free licence to use the AmigaOne, AmigaOS and Boing Ball trademarks and trade names granted under sub-license from Hyperion" [244].

In 2009, Hyperion Entertainment VOF was converted into a Limited Liability Cooperative Company (CVBA) in spite of having accumulated debts amounting to more than 300,000 euro, and thus not meeting the minimum capital requirements to set up a CVBA.

In 2015, Hyperion Entertainment was briefly declared bankrupt [233] upon request of the tax collection agency. After it eventually filed its accounts for fiscal years 2015, it emerged that its debt had risen to more than half a million euro [257][261].

The rights granted to Hyperion Entertainment under the 2009 settlement agreement covered AmigaOS 4 and the Amiga trademarks "Solely for the purposes of marketing, distributing and making available AmigaOS 4 and any hardware required or desired to operate with AmigaOS 4". While originally embracing this wording also in its 2009 press release, Hyperion later started to engage in a "rights creep".

Between December 2016 and May 2017, Mr. Ben Hermans, representing his law firm Monard Law on behalf of his company Hyperion Entertainment CVBA, filed to register its competitor Cloanto's "Amiga Forever" and "Workbench" marks [274] as its own with the European Union Intellectual Property Office [258][259].

Probably driven by the desolate state of its accounts, and with free legal services as Hyperion Entertainment's only notable asset, this move was seen by some in the Amiga community as overly aggressive [239], as it was increasingly meeting the definitions of conflict of interest and bad faith trademark filing, if not altogether legal abuse. The same discussion threads [239] also mentioned a tale of forgeries, blackmail, secret contracts and large cash payments, also backed by audio recordings [268] which were later confirmed in an article in the Amiga Future publication [278].

Comments and details that emerged in the discussion threads [239][268], and which were later confirmed from other sources, include:

• "Inventing an enemy to distract from internal problems is a timeless tactic used by hype-politicians everywhere! So Hype-rion and its owners are unable to repay their debt, and are positioning Cloanto as the new threat (Why? What changed?), as if Hype-rion wasn't its own worst enemy. For Hype-rion to register the 'Amiga Forever' trademark, only to annoy Cloanto who has been working on Amiga Forever since 1996, sets new standards for 'playing dirty' in the Amiga community. Shame on Hype-rion and/or it's lawyer-owner (formerly a director, still acting as one... maybe somebody should report him to the Brussels Bar for this violation, for the conflict of interest, and for his legal abuse tactics?)"
• "Hyperion's attorney-owner Ben Hermans constructed an aggression that previously didn't exist and that nobody else wanted, but which can only be resolved by legal means. In doing so, he wants not only Amiga Inc. and Cloanto, but his own developer-'partners', to bleed through the nose. They may have ousted him as a director in December, yet now more than ever Hyperion is a company controlled by lawyers... I feel very sorry for them!"
• "Ben Hermans appropriates funds intended for A-EON to purchase CPUs. Then he sends Trevor forged bank statements, showing that the money is still there. Then Trevor and Tony (his other partner) become suspicious and go to the bank, tell the director they are A-EON shareholders, and the director lets them read the computer screen showing all the transactions where Ben took the money out of the account (contrary to the forged statements). That is when they make Ben sign the document with the 'transfer to A-EON UK (without Ben)' and 'free everything' clauses (as admitted by Trevor in the interview to Generation Amiga [244]), threatening Ben's job as a lawyer. A variation of the story involves Ben driving Trevor to the bank, but intentionally getting lost in the woods in order to arrive after closing hours. Yet another one involves Ben drunk in a taxi, unable to get out."
• "For years, lawyer-owned contract house Hyperion Entertainment tricked Amiga developers into signing promises [e.g.'NDAs'] that were all but customary, limiting their future options. It registered the trademarks of its competitors, and appears to be in breach of the settlement agreement with the Amiga companies. Trying to get away with it once again (like the previous time, when it had been paid for the OS4 work, did not deliver, and sued the Amiga companies while their owner was dying of cancer), Hyperion sued all its competitors, probably hoping for another convenient settlement. Once again, these Amiga abuses are being funded by Trevor Dickinson's oil money (for Hyperion would otherwise be untenable as a company), and we are turning a blind eye to this too, because we so badly want to believe that there might be some good parts in all of this."
• "That's a true story. Simon Archer had just lent Ben Hermans 10,000 UK Pounds in cash. Hermans & partners (A-EON Belgium) then spent the evening celebrating with Champagne after signing the AmigaOne X1000 agreement. After they took a cab ride home, Hermans was so intoxicated that he fainted. He had to be dragged out by Dickinson and the others. Hermans even left the hard-earned cash in the cab. Lots of studies on alcohol and sociopaths. Fits quite a pattern. This is the person we are allowing to set friend against friend, leaving bitterness and debt as the only things that increase with the years."
  

When it already was in this status, Hyperion Entertainment met with Cloanto at the Amiga32 event in Neuss (Germany), and reportedly threatened various legal actions [266].

In 2018, in spite of not being duly registered in the Belgian Corporate Register [265][263] and thus not meeting the criteria to file a lawsuit, Hyperion Entertainment started a new series of lawsuits against various Amiga parties (Amiga Delaware, Amino aka Amiga Washington, ITEC, Cloanto).

Although Hyperion Entertainment later filed its accounts for fiscal years 2015, 2016 and 2017 [257][261][279], as of this writing (March 2019) it has yet to file accounts for 2009-2014. The 2015-2017 filings further revealed how the debt kept increasing by more than 40,000 euro per year. According to the Belgian Companies Code, which sets a minimum requirement of 6,200 euro for the net assets of a CVBA, Hyperion Entertainment CVBA remains an entity that should not have been formed in the first place, and which could be judicially dissolved at any time by a public prosecutor or by an interested party.

On June 12, 2019, the Amiga parties filed an expert report [283] by Paul C. Clements, the author of the definition of "software architecture" used in the 2009 Amiga-Hyperion Entertainment settlement agreement.

An insider source described the situation as "From what we can see, one can only conclude [that Hyperion Entertainment is going] for no-less than total control of the Amiga-ecosystem. At all cost... Given their failure to deliver, that's the only option they have left to remain somewhat relevant, but I think, and I think we agree, they're basically destroying whatever is left, even if they win all these expensive litigations."

On May 8, 2019, following the acquisition of the Amiga assets, C-A Acquisition Corp. joined the legal case [281]. In doing so, it renewed the stance of the Amiga parties: "Rather than accept the reasonable limitations imposed on it by the Settlement Agreement, and deeply in debt, Hyperion embarked on an unlawful and tortious course of action to claim for itself the right to do anything it wanted with Amiga, Inc.'s intellectual property... unlicensed use of AMIGA-related marks... and filing applications and obtaining registrations of Amiga, Inc.'s trademarks. In further acts of bad faith, Belgian lawyer Benjamin 'Ben' Hermans, the primary owner of Hyperion, used his law office, Monard Law, to obtain for his company fraudulent registrations for Cloanto's AMIGA FOREVER trademark. Hyperion has never used that mark." It was later claimed [284] that this contributed to Mr. Ben Hermans and Monard Law parting ways a few weeks later.

As some forum commenters wrote [288], "The core business of Hyperion today (their only business, judging by the financial books) is actually battling legal lawsuits against Amiga... Ben Hermans has ALWAYS been Hyperion regardless of all the legal smokescreens thrown up over the past few years... I called the bluff the last time [Ben Hermans] 'resigned' as a director (in practice he never stopped making director decisions, including initiating the legal conflict against Cloanto)."

More details to be added.

Observations on the Hyperion Entertainment-Amiga Case

At the contractually agreed [132] specifications and costs, the project for the porting of the Amiga operating system to the PowerPC architecture was a credible stopgap effort do deliver a moderately newer operating system to a modest community of Amiga users that was anxious to use something new, while Amiga Washington kept working on Amiga DE (based on the much newer Tao Elate/Intent operating system architecture).

The initial cost estimate (and the amount of the buyback clause) appears to truthfully reflect the higher end of amounts that were common in the modest Amiga market. To better understand actual sales volumes (as per a variety of 2007-2009 forum posts), once AmigaOS 4 was complete, it was produced in quantities of a few 100 units at a time (probably batches of 500), whereas the unofficial AmigaOne PowerPC-based successor named "Sam" by ACube Systems srl was produced in lots of 50 units at a time. Years later, it seemed hard for some to believe that an operating system could be written or sold for $25,000, but we believe that for the simple port (not a new operating system) that this was meant to be, it was a generous amount that made all parties happy. For other operating systems, for example Linux, ports from one CPU to another (including 68K and PowerPC Amiga systems) were customarily done as a community effort at no charge.

Things became more complex when Hyperion Entertainment was unable to obtain the full 3.9 source code that it was hoping to base some of its work on, and had to limit itself to the version 3.1 code. However, this was not unexpected, as the original porting agreement itself stated that "Changes made after as 3.1... There might be license issues involved with this" [132].

The first 4.0 release was originally planned as a port from one CPU to another, without adding new features (Mr. Fleecy Moss deposition: "The goal of this development was to move the Amiga as from the more antiquated 68k processor and custom chipset to a state of the art, PowerPC ('PPC')-based processor" [133]). Instead, during development, a number of new features were added by Hyperion Entertainment, which delayed the initial release.

On the legal side, during the AmigaOS 4 project, Amiga Washington found itself in need of transferring rights for the "Classic" Amiga OS (which Hyperion Entertainment was basing its work on) to the new Amiga Delaware entity, apparently for the prime reason of protecting this asset from the Thendic/Genesi vs. Amiga [21] litigation, but possibly also in a shift of control between shareholders. Thendic/Genesi were supporting a competing Amiga-inspired operating system, named MorphOS.

The original Amiga-Hyperion Entertainment contract [132] for AmigaOS 4 was from 2001, whereas on March 12, 2004 Amiga Washington stated [22] that on April 24, 2003, it had transferred the Amiga OS to Amiga Delaware (via ITEC LLC). This sequence of events was not considered credible by the inquisitive Amiga community, because it meant that for almost one year the "Amiga" company kept silent, or otherwise pretending to do business as usual, including negotiations and references concerning AmigaOS 4 [32] up to early 2004. At some point, Hyperion Entertainment had raised the doubt that as it found itself under judicial pressure Amiga Washington and its alleged accomplices backdated at least some of the contracts. On the other hand, Hyperion Entertainment itself had claimed to have entered a new contract with ITEC LLC [134] on the same date of April 24, 2003. If the Amiga Washington-ITEC agreements had been backdated, was the Hyperion Entertainment-ITEC agreement also backdated in a common act of collusion?

Mr. Ben Hermans not only was the managing partner (and later a director) of Hyperion Entertainment, but he had also provided legal advice to Amiga Washington [135] in its battle against Thendic/Genesi to "quash MorphOS". On March 12, 2004, his partner Mr. Evert Carton also testified in support of Amiga Washington [136].

The Amiga companies terminated the AmigaOS porting agreement with Hyperion Entertainment on November 21, 2006 [118].

As Amiga Delaware turned against Hyperion Entertainment [104], Hyperion Entertainment appeared to express surprise [137] at the previous sequence of events: "Subsequent developments in this case have only strengthened the evidence supporting the claim that ITEC engaged in the fraudulent conveyance of Amiga Washington's assets, first from Amiga Washington to ITEC, and then from ITEC to KMOS/Amiga Delaware, and that those acts damaged both Hyperion Entertainment and other creditors here in Washington, where Amiga Washington's assets were located."

In the eyes of the public, Amiga Delaware (the successor of Amiga Washington) further repositioned the AmigaOS 4 project, which had gained importance after it was found out [62] that Amiga Delaware had no rights over Amiga DE, yet the company had been valued $87 million for technology that in its documented description [60] could originally only match Amiga DE. Unsubstantiated claims whereby phones powered by "AmigaOS 4" were expected to sell more devices than iPhones [78] may be better understood from this perspective, and were not part of the initial plan [132].

At the same time, the Amiga community observed with passion how Hyperion Entertainment's lawyer-owners aggressively exploited the move from Washington to Delaware (which Hyperion Entertainment had previously accepted), using it to further attack the Amiga companies, as if the claim of the missing $250 payment was not sufficient to win or settle the case to Hyperion Entertainment's advantage.