Mike Rowe only wanted to create his own Web site. But this past November, the Microsoft Corporation sent an e-mail to the Canadian high school student and ordered him to close his site, MikeRoweSoft.com, which the company considers to violate Microsoft trademark rights. In an attempt to convey the company's "generosity," Microsoft offered the young man $10 to sign the domain name over to them, which would be enough to cover the initial setup fee for the domain name. Why the company believed it had a right to take a young man's personal Web site with virtually no compensation is beyond comprehension and unfair. Just because the name sounds similar to the name of the corporation does not give Microsoft the right to take it without proper compensation for all of the work that was put into it.
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