Chico_Loco - 6:13 pm on Dec 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm not clear on why $50,000 per instance. Wouldn't Verizon have needed to prove that they were damaged sufficiently to warrant such compensation?

I doubt very much that such damage was done because if someone landed on those domains, they would probably quickly realize that they weren't at the real Verizon and so back-up and continue searching. Verizon would have ended up with the business anyway (unless these domains were offering phone/communications services).

I agree that they should have to hand over all domains containing "verizon", and perhaps even send all monetary gains yielded from the domains (the ad dollars), and maybe even cover attorney fees... but $33.2m doesn't sound like a fair judgement.

Of course, we've likely got a serious bout of inflation coming over the next 5-10 years or so thanks to the central bank's bail-out Bernanke and the treasury... so $33m will be the equivalent of about $5 in a few years - maybe they can pay it off plus interest if they just hold out a while :)

The tossers should have at least shown up to defend themselves though!