Atari Targets Retro Community With Cease & Desist 219
svenski writes "Atari User reports that Atari Inc. have begun to target the retro community and have now turned their attentions to atari2600.org, a website first registered in 2000, demanding the domain name be handed over."
Trademark Dilution (Score:4, Interesting)
Eleven years of no enforcement means they effectively gave up all rights to the name. See you in court, Atari.
Re:Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
And apparently yours is blurry. That's a man, man.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's the crazy thing. Infogrames took the Atari name, presumably to capitalize on people's good memories.
According to what I heard when I worked there, they originally bought the Atari name as something of a job lot of IP, they didn't really want it. Then, they went on a 12 month marketing blitz in the US, to push the Infogrames name into more than just the hard-core gamer niche. After that, they did some surveys, and found that more people knew of a 10 year dead company than one that was trying to shove their name right in front of them at the time. So they said, "Fuck it", and started using the Atari name. At the time, someone told me, "Americans are too stupid to reailse that Atari closed down years ago."
Now they are attacking the very people trying the hardest to keep those memories alive. This makes no business sense whatsoever.
There's some very good reasons I no longer work there. Given some of the short-sighted and stupid decisions that happened when I worked there, I have no idea why they haven't gone bankrupt yet.