You’ve heard of cybersquatting, right? It’s when you register a url, such as windows7.com and hope that at some point Microsoft looks up the “whois” data behind that URL and contacts you with an offer of a handsome fee in exchange for transferring rights of the URL to their web team. Domain name squatters suck, but Apple App Store squatters are worse. Say you’re a development house, like Atomic Antelope, and you’ve made an application called “Twitch” that you want to upload to the App Store. Well, you can’t. Why? Someone registered the application name “Twitch”, along with every known misspelling of it, so there isn’t even hope for a web 2.0 parody called “Twtch”. Such assholes exist, and that is because of a flaw in the App Store submission process. Anyone can register an application with Apple, but during the last phase of the registration process, when Apple asks you to upload your application, you can choose not to upload anything until a later date, yet you still maintain rights to the name of the application you’ve registered. Worst thing about all this, there is no way for a development firm like Atomic Antelope to get in contact with the sack of horse shit who registered “Twitch”, and all known misspellings, and ask him to give up the rights for a sizable fee. Kdawson of Slashdot has the simplest proposal to fix this problem: “flush all the apps that have not submitted binaries, and to repeat periodically”.
[Via: Atomic Antelope]