When it comes to securing its domains, Apple has been somewhat slack in the past, and made instant millionaires of quite a few intuitive domain squatters. Earlier on this month, the fruit company sought to gain control over the iPhone5.com domain, which was being utilized by a squatter to run a forum and benefit from ad revenue, and today, it would appear that request has been granted.
Tim Cook’s company filed the dispute with the World Intellectual Property Organization, and as TheNextWeb is reporting, the squatter has been forced to forfeit control of the domain, which is currently in the hands of brand protection outfit Corporation Service Company – a firm likely being used by Apple to eventually take full control.
With Apple so hot on protecting its intellectual property, the move doesn’t necessarily insinuate that the next iPhone will given that particular moniker. After the presumption that the recent iPad would be called the iPad 3 or iPad HD turned out to be spectacularly false, now’s not a particularly good time to cast assumptions on Apple’s next iPhone moniker.
Apple is in the business of “righting wrongs” as much as anything else, and none of us will forget Steve Job’s biographical rant when he vowed to go “thermonuclear” on Android for supposedly stealing the Cupertino’s ideas.
While the details of this current affair haven’t been revealed, Apple is renowned for paying large sums in order to gather “back” domains of its products. While it managed to get its paws on iPods.com only a year ago, it’s also reported to have forked out a cool $4.5 million for iCloud.com, which is becoming an integral part of the company’s cloud services.
It’s important to note that when Apple goes down the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy route – as is the case here – the final cost of securing the name is in the thousands rather than the millions. The policy – while rather vague – seems to imply that when an “abusive” domain registration takes place, such as a blatantly copyrighted product, the holder of trademark reserves the right to initiate a dispute "by filing a complaint with an approved dispute-resolution service provider.”
Whatever the case might be, our gut instincts tell us that the next iPhone won’t be called the iPhone 5, why? Well, the iPhone 4S is the fifth iPhone.
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