Forum:Trademarks & Copyright Status

Note: I'm not a copyright attorney. Don't take my musings on such as legal advice.

I was given the idea the other day to search trademark/copyright databases for clues to the status of Purple Moon's various trademarks and copyrights. So far, the results I've seen are mostly expected.

Trademarks
All of the trademarks were either "abandoned" (I guess filed as no longer needed) or "cancelled" (not used in ~3 years and not actively maintained.) Most of the Purple Moon ones have the Shoreline Boulevard address on the record, and list a "Margaret M. Powers" as the attorney that filed them. Some of the older ones have "Michele McShane" as the attorney. Also, we now know that Tricky Decisions original title was Tricky Halloween. (That trademark was filed on the same date as New School's.  "Tricky Decision" was filed several months later.)  Some of the filings also have dates for when they were first used commercially. We might have just found nearly everything's release date!

Purple Moon Owned
Search results for "Purple Moon" as the owner (There's a couple of unrelated ones in there. Just ignore them.)

Mattel Owned Trademarks
Searching for Mattel specific releases yields only one result: a filing for "Rockett's World", filed in April 2000, as the title of a series of computer games as well as for use on a website (whether it's purplemoon.com or Mattel's own site, I'm not sure). It was abandoned in March 2001; pretty much the same time Mattel stopped caring about the series. This one was also filed by Michele McShane.

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:qlg113.3.6

Copyrights
All of the copyrights are still on record. Once again, I can't find anything specifically owned by Mattel. Searching for Camp Adventures and Dreams' titles yield no results.

Purple Moon
Mostly the same deal as the trademarks. Though there are a few more interesting entries. All of the original music from the Rockett games has their own filings, as do all of the book titles for the Scholastic series. (These are all filed under the name "Purple Moon Media", not Mattel.) Another interesting one is "Rockett’s new school & 7 other titles"; what appears to be a record of a intellectual property security agreement between PM and the Silicon Valley Bank in Palo Alto. The dates on the filing suggest that this was either part of them trying to secure a loan or as part of their bankruptcy proceedings. The SVB released the agreement in June 2004 according to another filing.

Search results with "Purple Moon" as owner