david and goliath, 21st century style

There's this 17-year-old Canadian kid by the name of Mike Rowe that happens to be a part time web designer. Well, in being as such, he created a website and bought a domain name for it...Mike Rowe Soft (see, a pun). Cute right? Microsoft doesn't think so. Somehow, Microsoft believes that people will confuse their multi-billion dollar corporation that runs most of the computers of the world (except you blessed Mac and Linux OS users...I envy you) with some 17 year old Canadian website designer and are thus claiming copyright infringement. Microsoft (not Mike Rowe, I know it's confusing) offered him $10 (TEN DOLLARS!) for the rights to the domain name and Mike Rowe (the kid, not the multi-national corporation) refused because he had put so much work into the site and money into self-promotion. Now he's in a big legal mess. He asked for $10,000 because of all the work. Microsoft then sent him a letter claiming that that had been his plan all along...to buy the domain name just so he could sell it for a large amount of cash (thus weakening his case). Which, of course, begs the question as to whether his parents named him Mike Rowe just for this pupose too...

He's having troubles with huge amounts of traffic (he claims a quarter million hits THIS MORNING), but his site can be found at MikeRoweSoft.com and worth showing support by visiting. If you can, you might also want to throw him a couple bucks as I'm sure he's going to need it to fight Bill Gates and company...but it's a worthy fight. I'd help if I could.

But the moral of the story is that yes, corporations are EVIL.