Legal battle over iTunes domain
29 March 2005
A 22-year-old from London is taking computer giant Apple to court over the iTunes domain name.
Internet entrepreneur Benjamin Cohen registered itunes.co.uk in November 2000 and claims he bought it after failing to register tunes.co.uk, which he wanted to use to redirect internet users to his music search engine, CyberBritain.
Mr Cohen, of Hackney, east London, is attempting to overturn a ruling on the ownership of the website address itunes.co.uk and is applying to the High Court for a judicial review of his dispute with Apple.
Earlier this month, the UK domain name registry, Nominet, handed the name over to Apple. Mr Cohen is now appealing to the courts, claiming that Nominet is biased against small businesses. "We feel that the procedure that Nominet utilises to settle disputes is unfair and biased towards big business at the expense of legitimate small British companies," he said.
Nominet insists that Mr Cohen was abusing his registration and, in a judgement dated March 10th, states that he offered to sell the domain name and continued to re-direct people from itunes.co.uk.
"The domain name, in the hands of the respondent [Mr Cohen], is an abusive registration on the grounds of its use in a manner taking unfair advantage of, and being unfairly detrimental to, the rights of the complainant [Apple]," Nominet ruled.
Mr Cohen claims not to have heard of Apple's iTunes music download service until after it was launched last year and says he was contacted by lawyers for the company threatening to issue a High Court writ unless he ceased using the domain name.
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