Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment

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

Operator of Perrysburg Ohio Warehouse.

[edit] Domain name issue

The company became known to much wider audiences because its domain name utube.com (or UTUBE) appears to be very similar to youtube.com (or YouTube, see YouTube sued by sound-alike site, [1]). The company had purchased the domain name in 1996. In August 2006, the company's website received 68 million "hits" on its website which led to its computer servers crashing. Many of the users intended to go the video archive website YouTube.com, 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. The case is still pending.^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}

[edit] References

1. ^ Hutcheon, Sephen. "Policeman's YouTube email goes to utube", The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved on December 6, 2006.
2. ^ Olson, Parmy. "UTube Vs. YouTube: It Gets Ugly", Forbes. Retrieved on December 6, 2006.
3. ^ Dublin, Nancy Gohring. "YouTube faces lawsuit from holder of similar domain", Computerworld New Zealand. Retrieved on December 6, 2006.
4. ^ http://www.utube.com/news/utube-v-youtube-info.asp

[edit] External links

• Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Official Web-site
• Court lawsuit documents at The Smoking Gun website page