Saturday
we told you ModMyiF0ne.com (intentionally misspelled throughout article - we're rewriting the correct spelling, so it wouldn't show up) would be ending. We meant it, kinda.
Over the course of the last year or so, we've been in a constant, quiet legal battle with Apple in regards to the usage of the iPhone trademark in our site name. After over 10 months of back and forth, and a decent sum of legal bills piling up (hopefully for them too - I'm sure their lawyers cost more than ours
), we've settled with Apple and agreed to stop all usage of the ModMyiF0ne (as well as our original ModMyiPhone) name. They, in turn, have agreed to back down.
Some of you may remember October of 2007
when we changed from ModMyiPhone.com to ModMyiF0ne.com. Apple had sent us a letter telling us we had to stop usage of the word iPhone in our name. Not wanting to get in any shindig's with the bigwigs, we quickly agreed and changed domains. Apple, in all their amicable spirits, countered that the word iFone is phonetically similar to iPhone, and thus was still infringing on their trademark. We lawyered up.
Good ol Townsend and Townsend and Crew (Apple Inc.'s legal representatives) and ModMy, LLC have been since tossing punches at each other for a while now, but of course we're no match for Apple - we have neither the time nor the money they do for this kind of stuff. In the end, we wound up with a signed agreement stating if we changed to ModMyi.com and ceased operating under the previous two names, they'd release us of any liability - so here we are.
This means no more domain changes - we've got it in writing we're kosher now.
With the move will come a few changes.
You'll notice on the
forums home page, we've added tabs at the top.
We're taking this opportunity to broaden our forum discussion areas into all things Apple. Got an
iPod Classic?
MacBook? Discuss it in our new forums, and watch the front page for all kinds of Apple news now. Of course, our main love is still the iPhone and iPod Touch, and that's what we're all about. We figure, hey, if you guys love Apple products as much as we do, why not talk about 'em?
Also, look for major graphical and structural changes and upgrades to the site all September, as we clean up and organize a ton, add functionality, and tweak stuff that isn't working great a the moment. If there's things you'd like to see at MMi (see, you can still call it MMi
), let us know by commenting in this thread - we're open to suggestions.
ModMyi has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year to become the largest iPhone community on the net. You guys' feedback and participation is what makes us able to offer what we do, and stick around. We started out a year ago running on a single server which a buddy helped us run, and now have a half dozen fully dedicated
beefy machines which serve up the ModMy, LLC network of sites. We're dedicated to bringing you the latest in iPhone/iPod Touch modding, tweaking, and customizing (hey, that's why we're here, and what we've been doing
since the beginning). We love doing it, and plan on hanging around for a good long while. I don't see Apple stopping production of iPhone's anytime soon - you?
Glad to have you with us, welcome to ModMyi.com.
Oh, and if you've linked to us on any of your sites, blogs, etc, please help us out by changing that link to our new name. This domain change shouldn't be a big deal at all, but we'd still like to have folks pointing to the correct new domain.
Also thanks to the singlehop crew for staying up with us all night helping us get up and running on the new domain name. Props!
09-14-2008, 06:33 AM
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