Alaska Apple Store Piracy
It appears the Alaska MacStore has hijacked the MacHaus dot com address. The details of this Alaska Apple MacHaus / MacStore feud are unknown. What is obvious, is that in recent days the domain name www.machaus.com has come to life with MacHaus’s competitor, the Alaska MacStore. At the time of writing this article, MacHaus’s website at www.machaus.net was also completely unreachable.
I made a few calls to MacHaus to see what was going on and simply found out they are aware of the situation and taking “appropriate steps” to deal with the situation. Once I get some details from the owner of MacHaus, I’ll update this story.
One thing for certain is that we are witnessing what appears to be a clear violation of ICANN rules and the law. Unless there is a legal debate over the name MacHaus itself, the fact that the Alaska MacStore is using MacHaus.com is a clear ethical and legal step over the line.
It’s also fitting and ironic that MacStore is using a giant pirate symbol on the new MacHaus.com website.
Update:
September 22, 2008
Now, the day after I posted this story, MacHaus.com is redirecting to akmacstore.com. Someone is trying to obscure and redirect traffic. Tsk tsk, naughty.
September 23, 2008
It appears the fault of the Machaus.net disappearance was purely coincidence and more the fault of ACS than anyone else.
I’ll keep digging on this story. More to come…
