If you've been wondering just what the heck is up with Apple's legal department lately, you're not alone. Specifically, the one question weighing most heavily on our minds these days is, "Given that Apple faces several lawsuits right now, including one which carries the knee-knocking potential to cost the company a whopping $3.3 billion in damages, why the heck are they spending time writing threatening letters to a couple of teenagers in Calgary in an attempt to wrest control of a domain name they don't particularly need anyway?" We speak, of course, of this whole fracas over appleimac.com, a domain on which a Canadian teen is currently cybersquatting, and one which he admits he registered just to increase traffic to his non-Apple-iMac-related web site. Apple's lawyers sent him a stern letter claiming that he's messing with their trademarks (which he can hardly deny) and demanding that the domain be signed over to them immediately.

Despite the fact that the kid quite clearly hasn't a legal leg to stand on, the reportedly brusque manner in which Apple's lawyers tried to bully him has led to a fair amount of controversy, with Apple being cast as the Big Evil Corporation™ out to crush the little guy. So why would Apple risk a public relations black eye all for the sake of one piddly domain name? Well, with the help of a clue from Mac OS Rumors, we at AtAT think we've stumbled upon the answer. One of MOSR's readers dug around a bit and found that Apple has apparently been on a rampage to register as many "iMac and Apple"-themed domain names as possible; they now own imac-apple.com, apple-imac.com, imac-applecomputer.com. applecomputer-imac.com. imacapplecomputer.com, applecomputerimac.com, and imacapple.com. Apparently Steve Jobs is an honest-to-goodness domain name collector, and he just needs appleimac.com to complete a matched set.

We strongly suspect that the registration of all these domain names is, in fact, being performed by a complex AppleScript that is designed to register every possible combination of the words "iMac," "Apple," and "Apple Computer." We also doubt that a man as driven as Steve Jobs would stop at a collection limited to only a single occurrence of each word, so the script is probably designed to work on combinatorial permutations well into the next century. So if you were planning on registering imacapple-imac-applecomputerapple-imac.com, you'd better hurry. Your only other chance is to hope that Steve turns his collector's eye towards some other pursuit, such as assembling a complete set of retired Beanie Babies. Hey, it could happen.

Is it just us, or is Apple Recon getting even more sarcastic than usual lately? Yes, their tone has always been somewhat adversarial in nature, and tends to hang out in "We Know More Than You Do" land-- that's part of their charm, after all. But recently it seems like they're starting to get downright nasty at times. There was that whole flap about the "Chameleon iMacs," for instance, but what got us thinking about this now was their latest installment about the "Millennium Special" WebMate. First, the background: if you haven't been keeping up with the whispers in the rumors circles, recently there's been some talk that Apple plans to release a version of its upcoming "WebMate" consumer portable computer that includes a special "wind-up" power source. The idea is that if your WebMate is low on battery power and you're not near a standard outlet, you can just crank some juice into the batteries by using old-fashioned elbow grease.

Don't laugh; the wind-up power source they're talking about exists, and it's used in radios and other electrical equipment for use in countries without ubiquitous power grids. The thing is, we read about this technology a couple of years ago, when it was rumored to be included "soon" in a version of the ill-fated eMate. In an eMate, a wind-up power source makes a fair amount of sense; since it was basically a Newton MessagePad with a keyboard, there was no big color screen or spinning hard disk to suck down a ton of power. Plus, it's kind of a neat gimmick to throw into a portable designed for grade-school kids who can crank up the juice on the bus during the field trip tot he museum. A WebMate, though, is expected to be a full-fledged laptop computer, and it's going to need a lot more power than a hand crank will provide-- unless you can type one-handed while cranking at 70 RPM with the other. We strongly suspect that rumors of the wind-up generator's inclusion in the WebMate was just a mutation of the old eMate stories.

Regardless, Recon pounced on the rumor and blew it up into a full-fledged masterpiece of sarcasm. In their world, Apple's preparing to market the hand-cranked WebMates as a "Millennium Special," built to provide "wireless Internet" after the Y2K bug causes widespread power outages. They go and on about hand-cranking to watch streaming QuickTime footage of widespread panic in the streets, and the optional $399.95 Exercise Cycle package which lets you keep your WebMate powered while you exercise, "since you won't be able to get to your health club because the world is going to hell in a handbasket all around you!" Top it all off with their report that the official product name of this wind-up wonder will be the "Model T," and, well, you get the picture. So, uh, Recon-- how do you really feel about the wind-up WebMate rumors? But then again, if goofy rumors about color-changing iMacs and hand-cranked WebMates are a crucial part of the whole online Macintosh experience (and we think they are), Recon's "knowier-than-thou" attitude is just as integral. We're all just one big happy family, after all.

Apple Computer's good name has been dragged back into the plotline on "Redmond Justice" lately, as Microsoft's latest witness addresses the accusations made by Avie Tevanian during his testimony for the government's side. Avie, longtime viewers will recall, claimed not only that Microsoft tried to bully Apple into dropping QuickTime development for the Windows platform, but also that they then sabotaged QuickTime for Windows when Apple refused. In a trial jam-packed with juicy accusations of wrongdoing, Avie's stands out as perhaps one of the most direct. With the QuickTime issue, there's no pussyfooting around about whether or not "integrating" a web browser into an operating system is anticompetitive behavior-- according to Avie, Microsoft told a competitor to drop their product, and when they didn't comply, deliberate steps were taken to cripple that product.

Of course, Microsoft categorically denies the whole thing, and Eric Engstrom towed the party line when testifying before Judge Jackson on Wednesday. Eric's the manager of Microsoft's DirectX Multimedia project, and while he admits that they tried to get Apple to adopt their own multimedia technology, he says the claim of sabotage is "completely unfounded." "Our company would never do something like that," he says. He neglected to mention that there are previous accusations that Microsoft did exactly that when they tried to run a competing DOS product out of the market. In fact, the modus operandi is identical-- just as Avie claims that Windows 95 reported "questionable" error alerts when it was told to use QuickTime instead of Microsoft's own multimedia technology, Caldera once alleged that Windows 3.1 included a fake error message intended to appear when it encountered Caldera's DR-DOS instead of Microsoft's version.

Is this just history repeating? Depending on whom you believe, planting "troublesome" error alerts to get customers to stick with all-Microsoft software could be business as usual in Redmond. Regardless, whether the judge believes Avie's claims or not may well be irrelevant, given all of the other antitrust evidence stacked against Microsoft. They haven't lost yet, but time is running out...