mikerowesoft is being forced to change name

[Tones]

With that said, I hope he wins.

You know that Microsoft is going to pay their team of lawyers a few hundred thousand for the suit instead of just settling for $10k, like the kid requested. Why? Because they can.

[Critical Overdrive]

You know that Microsoft is going to pay their team of lawyers a few hundred thousand for the suit instead of just settling for $10k, like the kid requested. Why? Because they can.

They sue, because they love.

[Chemist]

wow.. all because a kid put the word 'soft' after his own name and based an internet business after it..
What is the world coming too?

[bandit]

MS is the geh for suing a 17 yr old.

[voltz]

You know that Microsoft is going to pay their team of lawyers a few hundred thousand for the suit instead of just settling for $10k, like the kid requested. Why? Because they can.

That is about the funniest thing too because that money spent could easily cover the $10,000 he was asking for and we know M$ LOVES to spend.

If he has a patent over the name already, I can see how this case isn't going anywhere.

[Diff-chan]

No voltz.

First of all, you cant patent a name. You can copyright a name, but Microsoft is going to challenge that he bought the domain so that he could hit up MS for cash - in this case, $10,000.

Know what cybersquatting is? It's when I register, lets say, MyCrowSoft.com and then wait until MS wants it and then I ask them for tons of money. I only registered it to get money from MS.

So MS is going to contend that since he asked for $10,000 (and it only costs $10 to transfer the domain), he was going to cybersquat.

It sounds like MS is in a good position here.

Now, if this kid didn't make that fuckup, MS would have to prove all sorts of other shit and it could go either way.

[MechDeus]

Microsoft was going after a 17 year olds part time business that he put a lot of time into just because it has the same phonetic sound as their company.

I couldn't figure out what was going on until I read this line, probably something with me not pronouncing words in my head when I'm reading.

[soundwave]

Don't you remember the Simpsons episode (Das Bus) where Homer started his own internet company Compu-Global-Hyper-Meganet and Bill Gates came by to "buy" him out by trashing his office. It was an incisive jab at the dot com boom era.

Umm, yeah that's it.

[Damian79]

My question is, how the heck can they possibly prove that people are retarded enough to spell MS as mikerowesoft? As far as I know he isn't breaking any laws as copyright infringement as far as I know doesn't really cover phonetics.

[MarkRyan]

Is cyber squatting even illegal? I could definitely understand it being illegal if the URL was copyrighted, but www.mikerowesoft.com is definitely not a copyright. And on top of it all, why would this kid--or anyone--ever assume that Microsoft would want to own www.mikerowesoft.com? Cyber squatting would entail sitting on a URL that is desirable, but there's no reason for Microsoft to want that URL.

Not to mention the fact that the website was his BUSINESS, and he had business cards and everything--he wasn't just sitting on a URL.