Hey all, heres something really interesting about that lovely company called microsoft...(heard of them?)
Anyway, a 17yr old kid by the name of Mike Rowe opens up a webdesigning company and names it MikeRoweSoft (say it out loud..if you're really daft not to get it just be reading it)..then registers mikerowesoft.com...a couple of days later he gets an email from microsoft's lawyers to hand over the domain for 10$...he refuses and says no way, how about 10,000? a couple of days later he gets a legal document of around 25 pages from the lawyers!! They are going after him extortion!!
Well there's also the small fact that under US copyright law if a company doesn't enforce its rights over said copyright, they lose the right to use it exclusively. Take a look at Kleenex - they failed to take steps to protect their name and now all tissue paper is known as Kleenex.
If you step back and look at the situation from another angle - what if this 17yr kid was a 34yr old guy in a basement and what if Microsoft were Red Hat or SuSE or Debian or some company that alot of ppl don't hate. Clearly this kid knew what he was doing - prolly had no malicious intent, but knew that he was using a similar sounding name for his personal company.
If the emotion is taking out of the equation - then it would seem right that the company enforced its rights on someone who may or may not have been impeding on their registered works.
Not that I'm a huge MS person or anything - in fact I've spent the last few weeks converting 3 sites from ASP/Access to PHP/MySQL ... just seems they automatically are painted to be the bad guy without due consideration.
Now as for the RIAA - these kids could not have handled their situation in a worse way. Suing everyone in sight might sound like a good idea behind closed doors ... but c'mon now. They would have been much more effective to realize that consumers would rather have music readily available - make an effort to buy Kazaa (since thats the one P2P they seem to be going after the most) and setup a monthly fee based service. They would have made a killing, kept their monies coming in (which only serve to make sure that the execs have a shiny new Jag for each day of the week - the artists themselves make little to nothing from the studios - the majority of their income comes from merchandising and concert tours).
But enough for this week :P
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