The conventional wisdom is that Hasbro ALWAYS owned the G.B. Blackrock trademark, and that the copyright section you cite was overzealous in Blackrock’s inclusion while trying to capture all those other characters. I don’t believe any buying occured, but simply that Blackrock shouldn’t have been in that list in the first place.

One thing I’m not clear on, though, is whether the Autobots knew the location of the Ark prior to this issue? Whirl seemed to imply that the Autobots knew of the Ark’s resting place when Spike made his reference to something under the Yukon ice, which opens the question of how – since no one appeared to know who’d stolen the Ark after the Unicron battle at the end of G1, except for those on it, or its destination. And if the Autobots did know it had crashed on Earth, why did they not investigate or do anything about it themselves? Optimus and the Autobots not knowing about the Ark crash and assuming Earth had been purged of all of the Transformers when Primus summoned them to Cybertron, thus not being concerned for what had been happening there for the past 20 years makes most sense, but I’m hard pressed to work out how that tallies with Whirl’s knowledge, unless I missed something vital in an earlier issue of Regeneration.