MikeRoweSoft.com: How a $10 Offer Became a Worldwide Domain Dispute

By Mike Rowe's dating, a FedEx Priority Overnight package reached him in Victoria, British Columbia, on January 14, 2004. He was 17, a Grade 12 student, and the owner of a part-time web design business. Inside, by his account, were a book over an inch thick and a 25-page letter from Smart & Biggar, the Canadian law firm acting for Microsoft.

The next day he published his side of the dispute on his own website. Nine days after the package arrived, the two sides had settled.

The record of those nine days is a short chain of documents: a registry entry, a few emails, a letter, a press statement and a settlement known only through what the parties said about it. Most of what the public knows about the letter comes from Rowe. The Register said at the time that it had not seen Microsoft's letter, and no full copy appears in the reporting reviewed for this article. Read in order, though, the surviving documents show how a joke on a name met trademark law, and how public opinion moved faster than any panel could.

A student moved his portfolio to a new address in August 2003

The website came before the domain. On April 24, 2003, Rowe posted a welcome to MikeRoweSoft Design, a portfolio he said he had finally found time to build. Over that summer he added a design for a Counter-Strike clan and another for a friend's fantasy baseball league.

The registry record for the address shows a creation date of August 5, 2003. Six days later his news page carried a plain announcement: he now had a new domain, www.mikerowesoft.com.

Rowe later explained the name in one line to The Associated Press. "Since my name is Mike Rowe, I thought it would be funny to add 'soft' to the end of it," he said. He told CNN he knew about the similarity but never expected Microsoft to object.

Both halves of that account matter. The first eight letters of the name were his. The suffix was the joke, and the suffix was what made the whole string sound like Microsoft.

The stakes at this point were small. The Globe and Mail later reported that the site had averaged four hits a day.

The first exchange produced two numbers

Rowe dated the start of the dispute to November 19, 2003. That day an email from Smart & Biggar told him that he was infringing and that he must transfer the domain to Microsoft. He wrote back that he did not want to give up the time he had spent on the name, his business cards and his listings, and he asked for a settlement of some kind.

The answer, as he described it, offered all of his out-of-pocket expenses for the domain, which came to US$10. Rowe replied that the domain was worth at least $10,000.

He explained that figure to reporters in similar terms. To The Associated Press he said he asked for it because he was "sort of mad at them for only offering 10 bucks." To The Register he said the offer had insulted him after the time he had spent on the site, and he described the counteroffer as a step "which I regret doing now."

The phrase "out-of-pocket" had a specific place in domain disputes. Under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, adopted in 1999, one listed sign of bad faith is registering a name primarily to sell it to the trademark owner for valuable consideration in excess of documented out-of-pocket costs. That wording separates the cost of a name from a profit on it, and the $10 offer and the $10,000 reply fell on opposite sides of that wording.

The Register drew the hard version of that link, calling the exchange the "classic trap" that companies set for domain owners. That was the publication's reading. Nothing in the sources reviewed here shows what the lawyers intended when they wrote the offer. They show only that Rowe named a price, and that a later letter, by his account, accused him of seeking a large settlement.

He said he heard nothing more until January.

The package restated the dispute in legal terms

Rowe summarized the January letter on his site the day after it came. It said, in his words, that he had all along intended to sell the name to Microsoft for a large cash settlement. It also said that Microsoft customers could confuse his pages with the company's. He wrote that Microsoft did not design websites, and that the letter pointed to Microsoft FrontPage, its program for making them, as the source of possible confusion.

The Age, in Melbourne, reported that the letter demanded that he admit to being a cybersquatter. The book, by his later description, held copies of web pages, registrations, trademarks, other WIPO cases and emails.

Rowe and much of the early coverage called the claim copyright infringement. Microsoft's own statements spoke of its trademark, and that is the right that a domain dispute concerns. He rejected the intent described in the letter. "I never even thought of getting anything out of them," he told The Associated Press.

His other reply was shorter: "It's not their name. It's my name." The same policy gives that argument a formal shape. It lets a domain holder show a legitimate interest by proving that the holder has been commonly known by the domain name. Whether "Mike Rowe" could answer for "MikeRoweSoft" is a question that a panel could have taken up. Rowe told The Register that the dispute was in the hands of WIPO, and none of the coverage reviewed here reports a ruling.

Public attention moved faster than any dispute process

Rowe told The Register that he went to the press when the package came. His site logged the climb. A January 15 entry announced an interview on CBC Radio in British Columbia. The January 16 entry listed local television. By January 18 the entry was titled "Overwhelmed," and he had heard that the story had run in the UK.

That Sunday The Associated Press picked up a report from the Vancouver Province, and Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler gave a measured reply. The company, he said, was in communication with Rowe in a good faith effort to reach a mutually agreeable resolution.

By Monday the site was down. Rowe said a quarter of a million people had tried to look at it in 12 hours and that he could not pay for the extra bandwidth. Later reports described the figure in different units, as visitors, hits or emails, so it is best read as a rough measure from one source. Another hosting company came through with an offer, and the site returned that night.

Readers began to act. Rowe set up a defense fund so that he could hire a lawyer, and ZDNet reported that other extensions of the name had already been registered, with one offered on eBay. One ZDNet reader wrote that if Microsoft believed customers could be confused, the company held "an extremely dim view of their customers' intelligence."

Rowe did not fully accept the role that readers gave him. "I'm a supporter of Microsoft actually," he told CNN. He blamed the lawyers, not the company.

One sentence changed the dispute

On Tuesday, January 20, Microsoft issued the statement that became the turn in the story. "We take our trademark seriously, but in this case maybe a little too seriously," it said. It called Rowe a young entrepreneur with a creative domain name, and it promised a resolution that would be fair to him and satisfy its obligations under trademark law.

The Globe and Mail wrote that Microsoft softened its hard line after the deluge of publicity. The company itself tied its position to the law. Struan Robertson, editor of the legal IT site Out-Law.com, told ZDNet UK that a trademark holder that does not act on a potential infringement risks losing that protection. He also said that Rowe may have a good argument, because the name was his own and he was not pretending to be connected with Microsoft. Both views came from one commentator on one day, and neither was tested.

Charles Weinberg, a marketing expert at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business, described the company's bind to The Globe and Mail. Such cases, he said, usually settle in a much quieter way, yet Microsoft also had to be careful about what it offered because it could set a precedent.

The settlement traded the domain for expenses, training and an Xbox

The agreement came on Friday, January 23. Microsoft announced it, and Rowe's father confirmed that a deal existed. His father said Rowe could not give interviews because he was studying for final exams. Desler offered a softer description of the first approach, conceding that it was "admittedly maybe impersonal."

The agreement itself was not published in the reporting reviewed here. Its terms survive through the statements of the two parties, and those statements largely agree.

The Register doubted this picture. It assumed that a confidentiality contract kept the family quiet and noted that the amount of the expenses was unlikely to become public. No document reviewed here confirms a confidentiality term, and none of the reports gives a figure for the expenses.

Rowe gave his own reason for settling. "I have a budget of about $1,000 to spend on lawyers, while Microsoft has a billion," he wrote, adding that a loss would leave him to pay the lawyers himself. Two weeks later his tone had eased. He described a conference call in his lawyer's office in which the Microsoft side joked that he was a nightmare for its public relations department, and he told The Globe and Mail, "They were just protecting their trademark."

The leftover money went to a children's hospice

The defense fund now had no purpose. On January 24 Rowe wrote that he had not been in the dispute to make money, and he offered donors a refund or a gift to a children's charity and let a poll decide. Supporters had given about C$8,000, or US$6,000. Most respondents favored the charity. In March he gave C$7,000 to Canuck Place, a children's hospice in Vancouver, and kept C$1,000 toward university.

He also sold his copy of the legal papers on eBay as "a piece of Internet history." Bids passed $200,000 by CNET's count before he restricted the auction, and those bids were dismissed as bogus. The lot sold for C$1,386.83, or US$1,040.

The address leads to Microsoft and the question stayed open

The settlement ended Rowe's case and answered nothing about the law. Other owners of similar names drew far less attention. The Register reported that the owner of Mikerosoft.net said he was getting the legal treatment too, and it suggested that his case might be viewed differently because he had not appeared on national news. Ben Edelman, who has studied cybersquatting, later told Priceonomics that readers would be better off looking at standard recurring disputes than at this one.

That caution fits the facts. The case was unusual in its parties and its speed. A company that said trademark law obliged it to act met a 17-year-old with his real name inside the disputed string, and a letter accused him of seeking a large settlement after he had named a number in anger. The public judged those facts before a panel could. Microsoft's concession and the settlement came within days of that judgment, and the coverage reviewed here never reports a decision on who had the better right to the name.

The address outlasted the dispute. As of November 3, 2026, the registry record still shows the 2003 creation date, with MarkMonitor as registrar, and an HTTP check of mikerowesoft.com on that date redirected to microsoft.com. Rowe's joke now serves as one more door into the company it sounded like.

The legal line that the case never reached is still the one that matters to anyone who registers a name close to a brand. Namefi Resources covers it in Cybersquatting vs Legitimate Domaining: UDRP and ACPA Explained.

Sources and further reading

All links were fetched on 2026-11-03. Press coverage from 2004 used in this article is listed by outlet. Reports attribute most facts about the letter to Mike Rowe, and the letter itself was not available for review.

Primary records

• Mike Rowe — MikeRoweSoft Design, archived October 17, 2003 (April and August 2003 news posts)
• Mike Rowe — MikeRoweSoft.com, archived January 19, 2004 (January 15 account and later updates)
• Mike Rowe — MikeRoweForums.com at the old address, archived January 26, 2004 (January 24 settlement and donation post)
• Mike Rowe — MikeRoweForums.com, archived March 22, 2004 (Canuck Place donation post)
• Verisign — RDAP record for mikerowesoft.com
• ICANN — Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, paragraphs 4(b)(i) and 4(c)(ii)

January 2004 reporting

• The Associated Press via CBS News — Microsoft Goes After MikeRoweSoft
• The Associated Press via CBS News — Microsoft Not Soft On Mike Rowe
• The Register — Microsoft lawyers threaten Mike Rowe (17)
• CNN — Teen fights to keep MikeRoweSoft.com (archived copy)
• The Globe and Mail — Goodbye Mikerowesoft
• ZDNet UK — Microsoft: We took MikeRoweSoft too seriously
• ZDNet UK — MikeRoweSoft garners funds to fight back
• The Age — Teenager takes on a corporate monster
• The Associated Press via CNN — Microsoft to take over MikeRoweSoft.com (archived copy)
• BBC News — Boy swaps MikeRoweSoft for Xbox
• CNET — MikeRoweSoft settles for an Xbox
• The Register — Mike Rowe goes soft, hands over PR victory

Aftermath and later reporting

• CNET — MikeRoweSoft sell-off bids going, going...down
• The Globe and Mail — Microsoft vs. mikeRowesoft ends amicably
• Taipei Times — Sued teen sells letter from Microsoft
• The Associated Press via USA Today — Teen who battled Microsoft donates defense fund to charity (archived copy)
• Priceonomics — Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft