Clever Puns Don’t Fly with Microsoft

The meme du jour is about one Mike Rowe, a local 17-year-old who started a Web design company called mikerowesoft.com (currently down, no doubt from bandwidth issues). His cheekiness got him a lengthy legal letter from the other, slightly larger, Microsoft:

But the folks at the world’s biggest software company aren’t smiling — they’ve demanded that he give up his domain name. Mike, a self-described computer gook, registered the name in August. In November, he received a letter from Microsoft’s Canadian lawyers, Smart & Biggar, informing him he was committing copyright infringement.

I fear that this is all going to end in tears. It seems, as usual, that Microsoft couldn’t care less about the lousy PR this is genereating.

UPDATE: The lads on Slashdot point out that the article is technically incorrect, as Microsoft should be filing against Mike Rowe for ‘trademark infringement’, not ‘copyright infringement’. This highlights, I think, how much the average journalist understands about digital rights.