YNOT – Apple Computer Inc. is notoriously anti-porn. It’s also a vigorous defender of its intellectual property rights. So when the company last week filed a complaint against the operator of seven domains that employ the term “iPhone” to redirect surfers to a mobile porn site, no one should have been surprised.
Apple reportedly has asked the World Intellectual Property Organization to determine whether its trademarked brand name has been misappropriated and presumably wants the domains handed over for safekeeping.
The seven domains — iPhoneCamForce.com, iPhoneCam4s.com, iPhonePorn4s.com, iPhoneSex4s.com, iPhoneXXXForce.com, iPhone4s.com and Porn4iPhones.com — all redirect to FreeNaughty4Mobile.com, a portal that in turn redirects traffic to 19 explicit mobile pay sites operated by Casa Dominio SA, a company with a post office box in Panama. FreeNaughty4Mobile’s ownership is obscured by registrar Moniker’s privacy service, but according to WHOIS records, the seven domains to which Apple has taken exception were registered in 2008 by Mobival, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based mobile content company co-founded and co-owned by Ofer Zur. Zur has appeared on panels at adult industry trade shows as a representative of Mobival, which still owns and administers the domains, according to WHOIS.
In a brief report at Domain Name Wire, writer Andrew Allemann speculated that what may most objectionable about the seven disputed domains is their use or implication of “iPhone 4S,” the latest incarnation of Apple’s trendsetting mobile phone. That someone registered the domains more than three years before the iPhone 4S debuted in October 2011 could be seen by WIPO as evidence of cybersquatting. After all, Apple has been consistent with its naming convention since the first iPhone debuted in June 2007.
Marc J. Randazza, an adult industry attorney who specializes in intellectual property matters, feels differently, however.
“I think that some of these [challenged domain names] would be defensible,” he noted in a response to Allemann’s post. Porn4iPhones.com, for example, could be nominative fair use. You can use a trademark, belonging to another, in your domain name. You simply must do so the right way.
“I don’t know how they were using the domains, so I can’t comment on this particular case,” he added. “But it isn’t as simple as ‘trademark in the domain name [equals] loss.’”
Although reportedly the seven domain names at which Apple has taken aim were down for a while late last week, they were back online Monday morning, still automatically redirecting to the mobile porn portal.
Apple has had little difficulty in wresting what it considers infringing domains from previous owners. Last year, the company grabbed two domains that incorporated misspellings of “Apple”: Apple.com and Aplle.com. In March, the company retrieved six domains that incorporated various references to the Macintosh operating system code-named Lion. In July, it took possession of several iPod-related domain names and two that misspelled “iPhone.” WIPO, a United Nations agency, sided with Apple in all of those disputes.
