So we did a little poking around upon our return, and from what we can make out, it looks like not much Mac-wise actually happened last week while we were off looking at big rocks and bigger holes in the ground. Seriously, try to think back a bit; remember the hot topics in the Mac media the week before we slipped off the face of the earth? Tiger's release date, the tussle between Apple and a British cybersquatter, and the usual spate of confused blustering one way or the other about Apple's lawsuits against leakers. Imagine our surprise to find that, over a week later, all three topics are still churning away, as if we'd just paused the world on a gigantic TiVo while we spent nine or ten days grabbing a soda from the fridge and are now picking things up right where we left off.

We already covered the Tiger release date (i.e. now there actually is one), so how about we check in on the latest in the Ben Cohen/itunes.co.uk goofiness? The last we'd heard was that Nominet, the UK's domain name registration authority, had decided that ol' Ben was, indeed, a cybersquatter, and so it awarded the itunes.co.uk domain name to Apple, whom it deemed to be the rightful holder of the iTunes trademark. Cohen then got all huffy and decided to get the courts involved; Nominet, he contended, is "biased against small businesses" and unjustly ripped his legitimately registered domain name out of his virtual hands just because Apple has much deeper pockets and much scarier lawyers than he does, so he's "applied to the High Court for a judicial review."

Well, we were already skeptical that Mr. Cohen would be able to sway the High Court with his sob story of representing a wronged "legitimate small British company," considering that despite having been ordered to surrender the domain name by April 13th, he's even now got it redirecting to some completely unrelated-to-iTunes virtual Ponzi scheme that promises free stuff for visiting such "legitimate" sites as 888CasinoOnNet.com and LoopyLotto.com and includes offers to "win a trip to the Bahamas" while also soliciting surfers to enter their PayPal addresses; now we figure he'll be lucky if he avoids being cited for making a High Court judge soil himself after laughing too hard.

See, the New York Times dug up a few more specifics of the case, and Ben's whole clueless-David-vs.-corporate-Goliath pose looks even shakier when you consider the new facts. You know how this guy's whole spiel is that he registered the domain name before Apple's iTunes ever went public? Well, Nominet says that's irrelevant, because what's at issue is what Cohen did with the domain name after he learned about iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. It seems that Cohen "subsequently sent an e-mail message to Napster, a rival music service, in October 2004 asking if it would be interested in buying his iTunes domain" to draw potential iTunes customers to its own service instead. And he admits that he even pointed itunes.co.uk at Napster's servers for two days "just to see what would happen," and only stopped when Apple started warming up its lawyers. That's what caused Nominet to rule Cohen to be a cybersquatter and turn the domain name over to Apple, and we doubt any judge in possession of the facts would buy Cohen's Doe-Eyed Naïf act.

Heck, it must be wearing thin for the media, too. Here's Cohen spouting off his "Aren't I So Innocent?" blather again, accusing Apple of "bully boy" tactics and "trying to push [him] around": "Apple should have asked nicely for the domain, then we would have been more than happy to consider their offer. Instead they tried to intimidate me, which put me in a bad frame of mind." Okay, fine-- except that by Cohen's own admission, before Nominet got involved, Apple wrote to his lawyer and offered to buy the domain name for $5,000; Cohen insisted that five large "would barely have covered [his] legal costs" (apparently in the UK you need at least a half-dozen lawyers on retainer just to transfer a domain name, and thirty or more to file a simple change-of-address form-- who knew?) and demanded roughly 19 times that amount instead. That's when Apple appealed to Nominet to intervene. So, what-- the $5,000 offer didn't count as "asking nicely"? Did Apple forget to curtsy when it made its proposal?

Memo to all High Court judges: make sure you bring extra pants to work until this case is resolved. Just as a precaution, you know.