Photo Credit: Steve Krause Apple has filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to get the domain, since it owns the rights to the “iPhone 5” name. WIPO can do that, but what remains to be seen is whether it will find a reason to do so. According to its whois record, the domain is registered privately, via Fabulous.com (an Australian registrar) since February 14th, 2008 and has paid for the domain until 2021. That was after the release of the first iPhone (which was in June 2007), but before the iPhone 3G (July 2008). Now being that the person has been holding the domain for so long, I personally don’t think this is a case of Cyber-Squating. I’m thinking the person had no idea back then that Apple might give him a pay day in the future once they reach Rev. 5 of their iPhone Mobile Phone. No matter how this story ends, this could be a clue pointing to the fact that the next iPhone will indeed be called the iPhone5, even if the third iPad was simply called “the new iPad”, which constitutes a change in the company’s product naming pattern. Apple is no stranger to this sort of dispute – Apple had previously asked the WIPO to grant it a large number of iPhone 4S-related domains of which the most important was iPhone4S.com (which now redirects to the smartphone’s page on apple.com). And guess what? The wish was granted. That’s bad news for the owner of iPhone5.com. I personally think Apple should just open the checkbook and slide the guy a million and be done with it! And no – I don’t think this guy is a cybersquatter. He’s owned that domain for a long time and appears to have tried to run a forum on it. Comment Name * Email *
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