Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment

Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation is an American manufacturer and supplier of metal machine tubes and pipes that was founded in 1985. The company specializes in buying and selling tube mills, pipe mills and rollforming machines. The company is currently based in Perrysburg, Ohio.

Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment logo

Domain name

The company became known to much wider audiences because its original domain name uTube.com appeared to be very similar to YouTube.com.[1] The company had purchased the domain name in 1996. In August 2006, the company's website received 68 million hits which led to its servers crashing. Many of the users intended to go to the video archive website YouTube, but typed the homophonic "utube.com" into their browser instead. On October 30, 2006, the company took legal action against YouTube over the website confusion.[2][3][4][5] The company has since moved their website to utubeonline.com.

The case appears to have been settled in late 2007, when Universal Tube withdrew its opposition to several "YouTube" trademark filings by the video-sharing website, saying that, "The parties have settled their dispute."[6] UTube.com remains active, and shows large banner ads, presumably because the large amounts of hits that UTube still receives will generate extra ad revenue.

References

  1. ↑ "YouTube sued by sound-alike site". BBC News. 2006-11-02.
  2. ↑ Hutcheon, Stephen (2006-11-06). "Policeman's YouTube email goes to utube". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2006-12-06.
  3. ↑ Olson, Parmy (2006-11-02). "UTube Vs. YouTube: It Gets Ugly". Forbes. Archived from the original on March 19, 2007. Retrieved 2006-12-06.
  4. ↑ Dublin, Nancy Gohring (2006-11-06). "YouTube faces lawsuit from holder of similar domain". Computerworld New Zealand. Retrieved 2006-12-06.
  5. ↑ "Utube v. YouTube Information Page". Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation. Archived from the original on February 24, 2007.
  6. ↑ USPTO filing, 21 December 2007, accessed 26 May 2010

External links

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