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.