That's a good point. But what gets me is that Arrington is a former lawyer. I would have thought he'd have proper papers written up from the start.
Well he says in the article "We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark." So I'm thinking he probably has this covered, though it may be the other company sees a way around this or does not care about legal implications. It may be the product gets knocked-off by some overseas company before ever being produced itself (look out for the the iCrunchpod).
Maybe Chandra (the other CEO) has been told that he must go ahead and dump TechCrunch, despite the fact that Chandra knows it's impossible.
He can a) tell his shareholders to shove it, or b) get Arrington to tell the shareholders for him.
That's my guess.
No, intellectual property and trademark legal protection happen automatically, without needing to do anything formal. It looks like he did little more than say "help build it, and we'll be partners".
I believe you are thinking of copyright. Patents and trademarks need to be registered in the US.
Arrington mentioned that the deal being contemplated involved a new entity buying Fusion Garage. I'm sure that would have required the approval of FG's shareholders, who don't currently seem to be strongly behind Chandra.
If that's all actually the case, then perhaps the mistake was failing to recognize early enough that Chandra wasn't the final decision maker.