Microsoft tells cybersquatters see you in court

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 23 August 2006 10:37

Your IT - Home IT

Driving traffic to your site and generating money from click-through advertising is the name of the internet game. However, when your domain name is a knock-off derived from a Microsoft trademark, you're now asking to be sued by Microsoft for cybersquatting.

Microsoft is going after four men in a civil suit who the software company alleges have registered more than 400 domain names that are deliberately designed to leverage off Microsoft owned trademarks or have names that are incorrectly spelled versions of Microsoft domains, sometimes referred to as typosquatting.

To provide an idea of the sort of domain names that have upset Microsoft: freehotmail.net, windowshome.info and host of other domains that include the words "microsoft", "windows" and names of products that are trademarked by the company. All four men who have been alleged to infringed on Microsoft's trademarks through cybersquatting and typosquatting have been publicly named in the lawsuit.

There has been speculation as to why Microsoft has allowed the practice of online infringements of its trademarks to go on for so long.

It would appear that Microsoft has only relatively recently become aware of how much damage can be potentially done to the value of its brands, not to mention how much traffic it can lose, through the practices of cybersquatting and typosquatting.

From a user's perspective, many would expect that a site with the name microsoft in the URL is an address that is associated with the software company and thus is a safe site to visit.