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.
In September 2007, Atari has renewed the registration of the Star Control trademark. To do this, they needed to show recent use of the trademark in commerce. In their application they did this by including graphics of a simple Flash game assumed to be created just days earlier. It is likely that this would not be enough if the trademark were to be challenged.