A multiplicity of corporate entities had already been in place well before the Amiga launch in 1985. Four "Amiga" companies, sharing in part addresses and officers, had been incorporated in California between 1982 and 1984:
Commodore-Amiga, Inc. (incorporated in 1984 as CBM Transitory Company, Inc., later renamed CBM Merger Inc. and then Commodore-Amiga, Inc.) [290]
Amiga Computer, Inc. (founded in 1983, was the main operating company until it merged into CBM Merger Inc. in 1984) [251]
Amiga International (founded in 1983, merged into CBM Merger Inc. in 1984) [250]
Hi-Toro, Inc. (holding entity founded in 1982, then renamed Amiga Corporation and dissolved in 1987) [247]
In 1984, the original Amiga creators, whose signatures were imprinted inside the case of the first Amiga model, sold the company to Commodore (West Chester, PA), the company known for successful 8-bit computers like the C-64. The transaction made Dave Morse, Jay Miner, RJ Mical and other Amiga team members millionaires [248]. As hopes that the West Coast and the East Coast groups could coexist did not materialize, Commodore took over all development. This led to the original Amiga team celebrating an "Amiga Wake" party on April 4, 1987 [249].
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.
The US Copyright Office recordation [203] was completed in 1998, five months after the assignment of the trademarks [222]. ESCOM's trustee Mr. Bernhard Hembach signed three contracts [205][206][207] that first assigned all the copyrights of Commodore Business Machines, Inc. (Delaware) [208] and Commodore-Amiga, Inc. (California) [204] to ESCOM, and then transferred the same to Amiga Development LLC, a company owned by Gateway 2000, Inc. As is common practice in copyright assignments, separate short contracts and small monetary amounts were used in order to maintain the more complex agreements and figures private (whereas the copyright records become public). Fitting with this pattern, the Commodore-Amiga copyrights changed hands for the total amount of three US dollars.
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].
Gateway 2000, Inc. formally became Gateway, Inc. in 1999. The last of the Commodore-Amiga patents (EP0316325B1 for "Cursor controlled user interface system", based on US887053) expired on July 14, 2007. In October 2007, after it no longer owned any Commodore-Amiga assets, Gateway, Inc. was sold to Acer Inc. (Taiwan).
The 2019 acquisition of the Amiga assets by Amiga Corporation [277][292] sought to bring to an end the dark chapter that started at the height of the dot-com bubble and ended with little more than hype and lawsuits. The related saga is featured in Amiga: The Dot-Com Years.