Microsoft recently filed a claim in the District Court of Florida alleging that Dan Traina and Instaclick Inc. of Florida, have been involved in a pattern of registering and using Internet domain names in a manner which infringes upon trademark rights owned by the Redmond, Washington based software giant.

According to the filings, Microsoft claims that ... 

“the defendants are the registrants and users of numerous Internet domain names which contain or consist of Microsoft’s marks, and or intentional misspellings of Microsoft’s marks.”

Included as Exhibit “A” in the filings was a list of supposedly contentious domains which the plaintiff indicate is “not necessarily exhaustive.” The domains provided to the court included:

CheatsXBox360.com
FaceXBox.com
JoinXBoxLive.com
MyXBox360Deal.com
RegisterMyXBox.com
XBoxLiveSetup.com.com
Encarta98.com
WindwsLiveMessenger.com and,
XBoxMyDeal.com*

A review of the whois information associated with these domain names confirms Dan Traina and Instaclick Inc. as the registrants, except that interestingly, as of today’s date, the domain name XBoxMyDeal.com* is not registered to to either defendant, or anyone else for that matter. The domain name is available. The inclusion of the domain name in the filings in light of its availability is not something I’m going to ponder here although I must say I do find that interesting. While there are a number of plausable explainations for this, for the purposes of this discussion they are not really relevant.

Given that the remaining names are confirmed to be registered to the defendants, and that they all include marks or derviatives of marks owned by Microsoft, the registrations when considered alone appear predatory; but more problematic than this for the defendants is the manner in which they used these domain names.

The domain names registered by Traina and or Instaclick were “parked” with Domain Sponsor, a well known Los Angeles based traffic monetization company. When users land on parked web pages they are greeted with pay per click ads. Unfortunately for the defendants in this case, Microsoft claims that the ads being displayed on the domain names which included their trademarks redirected surfers to websites offering products which compete directly with those offered by Microsoft. Note the reference to "Playstation 2" in the example below. If Microsoft's claims can be proven in court, the result will likely be a determination of infingement.

Unlike many of the previous cybersquatting slash infringement case filings I’ve read which often list previous WIPO cases the defendants may have been involved in or lists of domain names owned by the defendants which target other famous brands, the one filed by Microsoft made no such references. Curious, I did a little digging myself and inless than two minutes was able to put together the following list of domain names all of which are currently registered to Traina and Instaclick.

SearchGooge.com
Feceboox.com
Smsung.net
Amtrcak.com
Googleearl.com
Citybabk.com
Babyeinshtein.com         
1netzero.net
Yharoo.com
Rrbitz.com
Disnecy.com
Paylessl.com
Priclines.com
Geigio.com
Rootsathletic.com
BTicketMaster.com

In my opinion Traina and Instaclick Inc. have a losing case on their hands here and even if they are fortunate enough to wiggle out of the charges levied against them by Microsoft, they'll still be the owners of a bunch of other "loser" type domain names which the legal community is now on notice that they own. From the viewpoint of a domain name investment strategies, theirs is a disaster. It is neither viable, sustainable or even remotely close to being clever.

As long as pay per click parking companies like Domain Sponsor are allowed by their upstream partners to accept names like these in their monetization programs there will always be guys out there who register them and companies that will be forced into trying to uncover and stop them in defense of their brands.