Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation is an American manufacturer and supplier of metal machine tubes and pipes, 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.
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 received 68 million "hits" on its website which led to its computer 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 http://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 them extra ad revenue as a form of restitution for this unwanted site traffic.