Nintendo have lost a long standing battle with the owners of www.wiiu.com where the gaming giant has been trying to force the owners of the domain to hand it over, claiming it is part of their intellectual property and that the domain was originally bought by the host to extort money out of Nintendo.
The complaint was logged with World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) back in February and Nintendo have been fighting hard since then to try and get the web address free of charge.
Unfortunately for Ninty, WIPO have decided against Nintendo’s favour and has not granted them the web address, which means that Nintendo will have to reach into their very deep pockets and buy out the web address from the so-called cyber squatters.
Its shocking to think that a company as big as Nintendo has not thought far enough ahead to register the domain names of their own products before they announce them. However, Sony and Microsoft are also in the same boat as none of the next generation consoles have their respective web addresses registered to their companies yet. For example, www.xboxone.com is owned by a Krasimir Ivanov of London, whilst www.playstation4.com is owned by Poise Media in Merrick, NY, and both don’t even operate as working websites!
Nintendo had previously turned down the opportunity to buy the domain on open auction but with Ninty taking the WIPO route, the domain was withdrawn from sale.
So Nintendo; cough up or deal with it.