Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 December 10

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December 10

Legal question: who currently owns the Commodore 64 trademark, copyrights, and/or patents?

Who currently owns the Commodore 64 trademark, copyrights, and/or patents?

I did a web search and found two competing claims; Cloanto Corporation and Polabe holdings. There may be more claims, and they may be claiming different things; my search results were heavy on blogs and wikis. Reliable sources? Not so much. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:32, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

I have two Commodore Amigas, the Commodore 64 trademark is worth nothing. All patents expired before 2002.
Sleigh (talk) 08:45, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Worthless?

The makers of the C-One, the C64 Direct-to-TV, the 2011 clone,[1] the C64 reloaded,[2] The breadbox64 (if he ever gets it done and goes into production)[3] and the C64 mini[4] might not agree with you.

Patents expired?

Commodore International went bankrupt in 1994. Let's assume that they filed their last patent that year.

At the time .patents expired 17 years from issuance (issuance, not filing. The filing rule and the increase to 20 years started in November 2000). If the rule was the filing rule, the last possible patent would have expired 17 years after 1995, or 2012. However, in 1995 submarine patents existed, so the issuance may have been years later. So the patents have probably all expired, but it isn't a certainty.

--Guy Macon (talk) 09:27, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Based on the OP's expert information, all Commodore 64 patents expired before 1999.
Sleigh (talk) 11:08, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Per Guy Macon, brand names and trademarks are assets and have value, there have been many companies which have been liquidated, and the brand name revived by someone who purchased it. For example, Pan Am airlines went bye-bye in 1991, but the brand (with the same logos and trademarks) was revived by not one, but two unrelated companies: Pan American Airways (1996–1998) and Pan American Airways (1998–2004). There are LOTS of brands like that. Commodore is not worthless, and whoever owns that brand can still use it, sell it, or lease its use for their own purposes. Regarding the current ownership of the brand, Wikipedia has an article titled Commodore International which states, and I quote "The brand is now owned by C= Holdings (formerly Commodore International B.V.)" And there are two references. That same article also has an extensive history of the use of the brand after the original company died in 1994. --Jayron32 18:15, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Not Commodore, Commodore 64 trademark is worthless.
Sleigh (talk) 18:45, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

You keep saying that. It doesn't magically become true through repetition. --Jayron32 11:51, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Ex US presidents who ran again

I often post trivia questions for my Facebook friends. Two days ago I came across an interesting fact and posed this question:

Six American presidents ran for office after (not at the end of) their presidency. Grover Cleveland was the only one to succeed. Who was the only one who tried and failed twice?

[I now see a small complication: Grover Cleveland did run and lose at the end of his presidency; and then won four years later. But it doesn't make my question wrong.]

Now that I must reveal the answer on Facebook I cannot remember or find it. Most searches I try come up with things like incumbent presidents who lose, or Grover Cleveland.

I've received two answers I know are incorrect: Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover (who did live long enough to have tried a few times), but it either of them.

Please help!

Hayttom (talk) 10:35, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

• Question - when you say “ran for office”, do you limit the office to the Presidency, or does running for other offices (Congress, Senate, Governor, town dog catcher, etc) count. I know that our List of Presidents of the United States article talks about this. Blueboar (talk) 11:40, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

• Answer - thank you Blueboar! First of all the answer to your question, which is a good one because I wasn't clear higher up, is that I mean limited to the presidency. And thank you even more because although I had re-found List of Presidents of the United States today, I had forgotten that the gold mine of trivia I wanted is in a table at the bottom. Cutting to the chase - Martin Van Buren ran unsuccessfully for president four and eight years after his term ended. And none of my Facebook friends need know that I had forgotten this.Hayttom (talk) 12:29, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

TR decided not to run in 1908, but then ran in 1912. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:35, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Millard Fillmore also ran again in 1856, after having been out of office since 1853. --Xuxl (talk) 16:19, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

He might be the answer to the OP's question. He ran for a full term in 1852 and was rebuffed. Then he ran again in 1856 and was defeated. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:01, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Gosh, this is getting juicily complicated! If I was thinking only of non-presidents who kept running, I think we would bounce into Ralph Nader.

The king of the perpetual unsuccessful candidates could be Harold Stassen. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:17, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

The lead of the Stassen article notes 9 elections, but the article itself only verifies 7 or them (it leaves off 1996, and only in passing mentions 2000, with a cn tag). Lyndon LaRouche as far as I can tell ran 8 times definitely, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and the article describes all of the campaigns, including the 1992 one he organized from jail. LaRouche is a fascinating study, if his politics didn't resemble a current world leader it would perhaps be more funny. A man before his time, apparently. --Jayron32 04:32, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

• Van Buren ran as a third-party candidate in 1848, after losing re-election in 1840 and losing at the Democratic Convention in 1844, and got ten percent of the vote. He is one of only two people to get a majority of the vote for president at a major party convention (Champ Clark in 1912 being the other) and not be nominated, because until 1936, you had to get two-thirds of the delegate vote to be nominated by the Democrats. Hoover would have been liked to have been drafted by the Republican conventions of 1936 or 1940, but it's hard to say it was a formal campaign.--Wehwalt (talk) 08:06, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
• If Biden runs again in 2020, I think he will set the record for longevity as a serious presidential candidate, having sought the office at elections 32 years apart. Even Henry Clay didn't make it so far.--Wehwalt (talk) 08:19, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

He'll be 82 by 2024.9, that's pretty old. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:00, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Mehmed III: how many brothers?

Almost every source that addresses Mehmed III's famous fratricide says that he killed 19 of his brothers, but our article on Murad III lists no fewer than 21, all killed on the same day and buried at the Ayasofya. What explains this discrepancy? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 23:05, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

I spent a good deal of Googling time trying to find a list of the names of the siblings which was not connected with the WP article, but failed. The source quoted is not viewable online, but every reference work has 19 brothers who were killed, including one which quoted two Ottoman chroniclers. [5] Alansplodge (talk) 13:42, 14 December 2018 (UTC)