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My Strangest Business Deal Ever
What’s the name of a $66M aircraft really worth?
I once had the opportunity to sell a $66 million aircraft back to the company that built it. Doesn’t happen very often. Here’s the crazy story.
Let me start at the beginning. Absolute Entertainment was a video game publisher from the early 1980’s through the mid-1990’s. I was one of several co-founders of the company, and the CEO. In 1988, we published a military action game on the Commodore 64 and the Atari 7800 titled F-18 Hornet. For you retro game aficionados who care about such minutia, the game was developed by John Van Ryzin, of H.E.R.O. fame.
As was standard practice at our company, for each title, we had our trademark attorney file for protection of the name of the title. Ergo, in early 1989, we filed a trademark for F-18 Hornet in the category of Computer Game Programs.
Now, some of you might be hollering at your screen right now saying “just hold on a minute, that name was already taken.” Well, that’s actually not how trademarks work. A company can own a trademark in one market segment, and another company can hold the same mark in a different, unrelated market. The example my trademark lawyer always used to tell me was the trademark Cadillac; you can have Cadillac automobiles, and Cadillac dog food. As long as the…