Fanbois froth as Apple claims 'iPhone5.com' rights

Apple has filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Association against the owners of the domain name "iphone5.com", but devotees of the site to which that name links are not giving up without a fight.

"Call Corporate Of Apple and tell them to stop there persuit!! Blow up there phones, Spam there emails, call there Administration! Do something to get our point across," writes one of the fanboi forum's members, which numbered 364 as of Monday morning.

As pointed out by the news site Fusible, which brought the WIPO complaint to our attention, although Apple has paid in the past for domain names using its trademarked terms, it has more recently chosen to file Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) complaints against alleged infringers rather than shelling out cash.

For example, late last year Apple filed a complaint against a porn purveyor that was using a number of iPhone-related domain names to shunt iPhone-info-seeking users to its wares, housed at the rather less subtly named "freenaughty4mobile.com".

Apple won that round, as it has also won a variety of other complaints against other such domain names, including appleipods.com, ipods.com, appleosxlion.com, and others. Many others.

And such complaints will undoubtedly continue. As Fusible also notes, "Apple doesn't own iPhone6.com, iPhone7.com, iPhone8.com, iPhone9.com, iPhone10.com – you get the idea."

Yes, we do get the idea. Unless Apple drops its iPhone-plus-number naming scheme for its smartphone, as it recently did for "The new iPad", we are going to see a steady stream of such complaints well into the future.

And this complaint? We must agree with one iPhone5.com forum poster, who wrote to the site's owners: "I have been through a WIPO case with a large company and I can tell you for sure, you don't have a chance." ®