Whether motivated by trolling or delusional wish fulfillment, some guy tossed up a page pretending to be a registration site for a Halo 4 multiplayer beta last week. 343 Industries, the game's developer, quickly branded that as a fake, and the site was taken offline. That's not good enough for Microsoft.
The company has filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum and has demanded that Halo4beta.net be transferred to its ownership. It should be an open-and-shut case, writes the domain watchdog Fusible, and it's hard not to agree. Last year, in a similar case, Activision won ownership of modernwarfare3.com from a troll who had set up that site to disparage the game and redirect visitors to the Battlefield 3 official page.
The standards to win this complaint probably will be the same as the ones in Activision's: that Halo4.net causes confusion with a Microsoft trademark; that it was registered in bad faith, and the owner has "no rights or legitimate interests" with respect to the domain. Sounds like yep, yep and yep.
After warning of fake Halo 4 Beta site, Microsoft files complaint over domain [Fusible]