This weekend I noticed a post on Facebook in the “Commodore Amiga” group.
It was simply Amigapassion making a note that if you went to www.amigapassion.com you was redirected to Amigakit webshop.
Now this is simply put very not ok. As most of you might know. amigapassion (on real site: https://www.amigapassion.co.uk/ ) offers repairs of Amigacomputers. so does amigakit.
So Amigakit simply take use of people miss-writing the domainname and link them to THEM in a hope to do more sales/repairs.
I was afraid of this when I noticed they starting to register trademarks like a1200 etc, that something was going on.
Confronted them on Amiga.org that is owned by Amigakit. and in short the answer was that as they are more known. they can do this..
meanwhile I also recapped an Amiga sent to me. It was shipped in a Amiga 1200 case from A1200.net
Where I noticed THIS sticker:
Not a single WORD about it was from A1200.net. NOW we know why Amigakit registered the trademark A1200.
THEY wanted to take full credit of the case and the crowdfunding.
INSIDE the case you can however still see:
So they havent removed that (yet) or they just simply missed it?
Anyway. I do not know if business is going bad for Amigakit or they are just getting greedy. It is time for the community to react. My reaction is that I have done my last order there.
I would really want to know the story about why they registered amigapassion.com..
there was a thread on Amiga.org.. Will publish the screenshots here as I suspect it will be removed:
Screenshots of forum as I guess it will be deleted:
And here they closed the thread!
What do you think? is this behaviour ok? Am I overreacting?
you decide. there are plenty of amiga distrubuters out there. several that does not register trademarks and appartenly think there is not enough shit kept in courtrooms regarding the Amiga..
I can say one thing: I do NOT accept anything from me. Being DiagROM, ReAmigas or whatever be labeled with their logo.. no idea if I have the legal way to do anything.
but you all know: If they sell anything from me with their logo on: I am NOT ok with it.. and EVEN if they send money to me for that, I will return it. it is simply just not OK!
Fast forward to June-2021:
Where Matthew replied with.
However. expect more of this shit from AmigaKit. it is all about money and no love for the Amiga.
Manipulative, underhanded, dishonest behaviour – i’ll never buy anything from them.
No I don’t think you’re over reacting.
As a recent customer @ AmigaKit I had problems with an order I made in march (RapidRoad USB) and they informed me that it had been dispatched; I didn’t hear anything from them for two months + no delivery – I thought it had to do with the covid-19 situation – so eventually I e-mailed them and I got the answer that they had problems with faulty units. I didn’t got a straight answer from them about when they were going to deliver the goods and 3 – 4 weeks later I took contact with paypal to request my money back after I had contacted them again without any answer. After a week or so they informed me that the package was on the way and finally I got it – RapidRoad works fine by the way.
A few years ago I asked them about their floppy disk restoration-service but never received any answer. My point is that they have gone sloppy when it comes to customer service and all these experiences that are mentioned from diffrent people adds up to the total impression of the company. My suspicious is that they are trying to lay claim to the Amiga brand of some sort.
You’re lucky, products I’ve had arrive from them have become faulty and it took me a lot of tooing & froing to get them sorted.
This is the first time I’ve heard of this (even though it is years ago) and at first glance it does raise an eyebrow. As a regular customer of AmigaKit I wanted to read this and make my own opinion. I don’t have all the facts. I didn’t read this over and over and I’ve never heard this before.
I can understand the desire and choice to register several defunct Commodore Amiga UK (and international) trademarks. There are a lot of trademark trolls as well as patent trolls who usually squeeze those using them. If they can be acquired by a responsible Amiga company then I welcome it. HOWEVER as owners of said trademarks I would want this company to be responsible and not become a TROLL themselves. If *I* had acquired A1200(TM) then I would have offered a royalty free license to A1200.net (and other companies) either completely free or with a very small administration charge (no more than costs). If this was/is the intention of Amigakit then cool. Well done. Maybe explain your actions. HOWEVER if it was to gain exclusive use of these trademarks and exclude others in the market then shame on you.
It is common practice for commercial companies to register domain names similar to their competitors. The purpose being to re-direct those with “fat-fingers” to their website hopefully to gain a sale.
Morally questionable, definitely.
But legally acceptable, very much so.
Morals don’t pay bills!!
Should competitors feel that their intellectual property / identity is being misused by such practice they can first write to the company and ask them to stop but then apply for domain name dispute resolution. This is done all the time. I’d imagine that they would win and obtain the domain name for themselves. It is good practice as a commercial company to try to obtain similar domain names to your own on other domain suffixes (.net .org .com .co.uk) to prevent this. If I was struggling financially and I had a commercial shop website which competed for sales against others I think I’d try this technique. But I can understand why people don’t like the practice. It’s certainly a grey area practice.