Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment

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Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment
Founded1985; 39 years ago (1985)
Headquarters,
Websitewww.utubeonline.com

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

Domain name[edit]

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 October 1996.[2] In August 2006, the company's website received 68 million hits that caused its web servers to crash. Many of the users intended to go to the video sharing 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.[3][4][5][6] The company has since moved their domain website to utubeonline.com in April 2007.[7]

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."[8]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "YouTube sued by sound-alike site". BBC News. BBC. November 2, 2006.
  2. ^ "UTube.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved December 8, 2016.
  3. ^ Hutcheon, Stephen (2006-11-06). "Policeman's YouTube email goes to utube". The Sydney Morning Herald. Fairfax Media. Retrieved 2006-12-06.
  4. ^ Olson, Parmy (2006-11-02). "UTube Vs. YouTube: It Gets Ugly". Forbes. Forbes, LLC. Archived from the original on March 19, 2007. Retrieved 2006-12-06.
  5. ^ Gohring, Nancy (2006-11-15). "YouTube faces lawsuit from holder of similar domain". Computerworld New Zealand. Archived from the original on May 21, 2012. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  6. ^ "Utube v. YouTube Information Page". Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation. Archived from the original on February 24, 2007.
  7. ^ "uTubeOnline.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 2016-12-08.
  8. ^ USPTO filing, 21 December 2007, accessed 26 May 2010

External links[edit]