It has been making the rounds in the news that Apple and Spielberg intend to restart the Amazing Stories anthology series.
The problem is, they don’t own the Amazing Stories trademark. The trademark had belonged to Hasbro for some reason, and they let it lapse. A science fiction fan (and former fanzine writer) named Steve Davidson bought the trademark and has been working on restarting Amazing Stories as a science fiction magazine again. But now, studios (first NBC, now apparently Apple) trying to restart an Amazing Stories TV series are trying to use the Amazing Stories name without Davidson’s approval and without adequately compensating for it (apparently because they think he is too small to matter.)
Hereare articles from 2011 about the trademark acquisition. Here is a more recent interview with Davidson on the subject. And here is a recent plea for help over NBC trying to screw him. (The situation has not changed as of today.)
That sucks. It reminds me of a story where a guy had to pay to license music he himself wrote to use in a YouTube video because a bigger company made a claim to it and he couldn’t win.
Interesting. Thanks for the news. The Times had an article about the revival today, but didn’t mention the trademark issue.
TSR published the magazine in its end days. Wizards of the Coast bought them, and Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, which is how Hasbro got the trademark.
It would be nice if the magazine got revived, and even nicer if it lasted longer than the revived Weird Tales. But given the sorry state of sf magazine circulation these days, not likely.
Wonder what Ted White is doing?
ETA: The link seems to imply that Amazing has been revived. Never showed up in Locus when I had a subscription.
Surely someone could come up with a different title for the series Spielberg wants to do. If Futurama weren’t a Fox show, they could use The Scary Door.
It is on-line only at the moment. Intentions to produce a print version have been hampered both by the general problems with print media today and with Davidson’s wife coming down with breast cancer, draining his attention. (She died earlier this year.)
That reason being that Amazing had been bought by TSR (the company created to publish D&D), which was then bought by Wizards of the Coast (behind Magic the Gathering), which was then bought by Hasbro, to get MtG and D&D. I doubt Hasbro gave much thought to the non-game publishing part of WotC, aside from the D&D and MtG tie-ins.
Or is this just a nuisance lawsuit and the guy has no claims on the use of the name for TV? He might be trying to trick people into paying for a frivolous lawsuit to get Apple/NBC to settle.
“By 2007, Hasbro had abandoned the trademark. Davidson, who was managing the intellectual property department of an R&D firm at the time, routinely reviewed the status of some favorite marks. Noting the lapse for Amazing Stories, he filed an application for the Mark in 2008.
The trademark granted is for “fictional pieces, articles, interviews, illustrations, photographs, imagery, animation, digital video, digital audio and other information in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror in popular culture”, and is for both print and electronic publications.”
And, in fact, within a few years of buying WotC, Hasbro decided that publishing magazines was not part of their business model. They spun off Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine (both focused on D&D and other RPGs) into an independent company, Paizo Publishing, which published those two magazine titles under license to Hasbro.
The Wikipedia entry on Paizo indicates that they also published Amazing Stories for a short time (2004-2005); my assumption would be that that, too, was under license to Hasbro, if it was Hasbro which wound up letting the trademark on the name lapse.
Cut and Dried; but it looks less like a little guy fighting Goliath and more like a scam to me. He’s owned it for a less than 2 years, is trying to get others to help pay for his *Trademark Troll *shake down.
Sorry, I guess I’m too much of a cynic to believe the Op is accurate in the portrayal of this fight.
