Apple vs iPod Mechanic

What could be wrong with a company that usually repairs iPods? Obviously, there are a lot of things that could be wrong with such a company, but to make things more clear, what could be wrong with a company repairing iPods to end up in a court of law, facing Apple's lawyers? It seems that Apple has problems with the name, once again. Come on, those guys are supposed to repair iPods, should they choose "Tomato Mechanic" as company name???

What Apple did was to start a lawsuit against the iPod Mechanic, a small iPod repair business based in Michigan. The accusations are pretty simple - Apple claims that Nicholas Woodhams, the man behind iPod Mechanic, misused Apple's "iPod" and "Pod" trademarks on his company's website, and for the name itself, of course. According to Apple, Nicholas was asked to stop using the name of the media player back in 2006, and he agreed to drop the iPod Mechanic name by January 2007, and park the ipodmechanic.com domain by March. Until now, none of these happened, and the iPod Mechanic website is still working like a charm as we speak.

To make it all even worse, Nicholas is also accused of fraud, because he convinced Apple to send him free components, one example being his exploitation of the iPod shuffle Advance Replacement Program in 2007. The story is a bit more complicated, but I even noticed customer complaints about iPod Mechanic, one of them being available here.

As usual, I am sure the truth is somewhere in between, but I am amazed - as always - by how Apple hags on to these trademarks, even when doing such things is completely lame...