I think as long as you set it up as a community site, they couldn't really touch you if you claim fair use.
URL With "iPhone" In It?
- Thread starter TylerDurden
- Start date
I was selling iPhone accessories soon after it first came out - cases, headphones, chargers etc. My first foray into ecommerce and making untold riches on the interwebz. ;-)
I did. And had a .de domain. Just read the fine print of the GoDaddy TOS. They will rat you out at the first sign of trouble. In my case, I used GoDaddy's proxy service, so Apple hit GoDaddy first incl. their demands for compensation as mentioned above. GoDaddy forwarded it to me, not failing to add that I have to hold daddy harmless and that if I don't cooperate with Apple, they will. And sue me in turn - in proxy, so to speak - to get the compensation back. Yea, that's one way to call it a "proxy service", I guess, lol!
Don't worry, Apple's reach is pretty global.
You may wanna think again. I still have this link in my bookmarks:
modmyifone.com/forums/news/13455-apple-forces-their-hand-iphone-trademark-we-changing-domains.html
It was a community site. Before they got hit, their domain was modmyiphone.com. Unfortunately, the domain is now completely dead, redirects to Google (although not owned by G). But you can still see what it looked like at archive.org:
Internet Archive Wayback Machine
There was also iphone-forums.de and they had to rename to http://iszene.com/ for the same reason. There may be more, but these are the ones I know about.
Still, I think those are more cases of Apple trying it on, when they have no real legal grounds to, but because of the worry of getting sued by Apple, the domain owners just caved in.
I'm not a lawyer though.
It is a registered trademark though and they have the right - or as I learned, even the obligation - to defend it. If they get too lenient and it becomes too widely used, they can lose the trademark. So if you're using it for financial gain in any way, even if only by having ads on your site, you're walking on thin ice.
Claim fair use if you want, but if your whole commercial site's identity is based on their trademark, IDK how far you'd get with that... I'm not a lawyer either, just reporting what I learned from a few very unpleasant exchanges.
^This
Apple is one of the most zealous about guarding their intellectual property, and rightfully so. I have yet to see a site that was using Apple's brand names (and thus the "goodwill" associated with that name) in the URL like this that would have any prayer of convincing any court that what they were doing would be ok under a doctrine of Fair Use.