Ben Cohen and his CyberBritain company have given up the challenge for getting the iTunes.co.uk domain back from Apple. Apple won the domain from Cohen back in March. Cohen challenged Apple’s victory in the UK court system.
Apple may have won this one, but it still needs to get its domain name strategy together. It could have avoided the legal expenses of this entire debacle by having a proactive domain name policy. How they neglected to register the iPodNano.com domain name before releasing the product is beyond me.
This isn’t just a problem at Apple. Many companies don’t have a domain name policy, and it’s merely an afterthought. I recently had a conversation with a vice president at a Fortune 500 company that was merging with another company. I asked the person if they had secured the domains for the merged company’s name and products, and the VP said “I think that sort of thing just gets taken care of”. Well, it didn’t get taken care of and someone else has registered key domains for the new company name and its products.
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