iTunes Domain Owner To Appeal Ruling

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

March 28, 2005, 1:16 PM

The owner of the itunes.co.uk domain said Monday he plans to appeal a ruling that forced him to hand over the rights to his domain name to Apple Computer last week. Benjamin Cohen, the former owner of the domain and CEO of CyberBritain, called the ruling "unfair" and "biased," and will appeal it to Britain's High Court.

The decision was handed down by Nominet, the organization that handles the United Kingdom's domain registrations. Nominet said in its ruling that "the domain name, in the hands of the respondent, 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," which was Apple.

However, Cohen owned the domain name since November 2000, almost three years before iTunes was released in the United States and four years before its release in the UK.

Apple did apply for a patent on the iTunes name in the UK in October of that year; however, the details of that filing were only known to the patent office and not made public.

Cohen intends to challenge in court the way that Nominet hands down such decisions. "We feel that the procedure that Nominet utilizes to settle disputes is unfair and at the expense of legitimate small, British companies," he argued.

itunes.co.uk currently forwards to a music portion of CyberBritain's online shopping Web site, QuickQuid.com. It is unclear if Nominet will begin forwarding Cohen's domain to Apple's iTunes UK while the appeal is underway.