Star Control Intellectual Property
The name "Star Control" is a registered trademark in the United States. It is registered for use with "computer game software, and manuals supplied as a unit therewith."
It was originally registered by Accolade, in 1997. Accolade has since been bought by Infogrames (in 1999), which in turn changed its name to Atari in 2003.
While Toys For Bob itself holds the rights to the Star Control games it created, Atari remains the owner of the Star Control trademark. It is because of this that the Open Source release of Star Control II is named The Ur-Quan Masters, which was the subtitle to the original release.
On April 11, 2006, Alex Ness of Toys for Bob wrote this regarding supporting a new Star Control game, implying that they have recently re-acquired the rights to Star Control:
"Will you do that for me? Your old pal, Alex? If you were working at a video game development company who had 2 founders that had worked on a classic, epic space role-playing and combat game years ago for which you had recently re-acquired rights to and were hoping to convince your new parent company[Activision] to let you make a sequel by asking for the public to send in requests for said sequel, I'd email you."