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Microsoft to sue 'cybersquatters'
Company says sites waylay customers
Company says sites waylay customers
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Microsoft Corp. said it plans to file a new round of lawsuits in the U.S. and Britain this week against people it says are profiting from registering Internet domain names that contain the company's trademarked terms.
Called "cybersquatters" or "typosquatters," the targets of Microsoft's lawsuits use Web addresses containing terms such as Xbox or Microsoft, or slight misspellings of those words, to lure consumers to Web sites loaded with clickable advertisements. The Web-site operators profit when consumers click on an ad.
Microsoft sued more than 200 people last year, accusing them of running bogus sites. The Web-site operators illegally profit from Microsoft's trademarked names and create confusion for people seeking the company's legitimate Web sites, Microsoft said in August.
"This enforcement campaign is an expansion of the first Microsoft cybersquatting announcement in August 2006," Liz Candello, a Microsoft spokeswoman, said Monday in an e-mail.
Microsoft said last year that an average of 2,000 domain names containing Microsoft's trademarked terms are registered each day, and at least 75 percent are owned by professional domain-name holding operations.
Microsoft sued 217 unnamed defendants in federal court in Washington last year, seeking subpoenas to learn their identities.
A separate lawsuit filed in federal court in Utah accused two men in that state and a New Mexico man of registering 324 domain names using Microsoft terms.
The company also sued a California man in Los Angeles federal court, alleging he registered 85 domain names related to Microsoft.