Utube Sues YouTube

An anonymous reader writes "From The Age article: Universal Tube, which sells used machines that make tubes, has said it has lost business because customers have had trouble accessing its site." So now Utube is suing YouTube seeking a cease and desist on the youtube domain. (I wonder if they think Google's pockets might be deeper that the previous owners'.) This again raises the problems of domain names colliding across different industries and countries, and reminds me of the etoys/etoy tussle a few years back. Should domain name simply be exempt from trademark legislation in all countries or is it a legit thing to fight for?"

Comments

no way

[Anonymous Coward]

they'll never win.

Re:no way

[stunt_penguin]

News at 11?

Re:no way

[jdray]

I don't know what the problem is. I didn't have any trouble accessing http://www.ewetube.com/.

Re:no way

[Xaositecte]

Not a lawyer, but from TFA, it seems they, legally, utube a pretty damn good case.

They've got dibs on the name, and the choice of name is indeed leading to confusion between customers which is costing utube money.

Re:no way

[HoboMaster]

No, they don't have a chance. Legal precedence is that trademarks are only really an issue if there's a legitimate chance of confusing the two. No one's going to confuse a internet video service and a tubing company. It's like what happened between Apple Computers and Apple Records. Court decided that no one was going to legitimately confuse the two, so it was fine for them to have the same name.

Of course, that may be a bad example now, since Apple Computers is selling music, but back when the lawsuit was happening.

Re:no way

[Loconut1389]

Apparently, Apple Records saw it coming ;o)

Re:no way

[Xaositecte]

RTFA

People are currently confusing the two.

Re:no way

[HoboMaster]

Confusing websites != confusing companies. I've gone to many websites that were not the thing I was looking for. You don't get to the site and end up e-mailing them to ask what they did with their videos. One's a tubing company, one puts videos online. It's not hard.

Any court's going to say that there's no commercial overlap and therefore, it's not an issue.

Re:no way

[somersault]

That's like my idea for Wookiepedia..

There is no such thing as bad publicity

[LiquidCoooled]

I bet since youtube arrived their visitor numbers have increased, as the article says:
The company, with just 17 employees, got 68 million hits on its site in August, making it one of the most popular manufacturing websites.

How many of those hits were proper customers? Can we have figures from before youtube arrived? how many turned into customers after they hit the wrong domain?

How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company):

Universal Tube, based in suburban Perrysburg and founded in 1985, has about $US12 million ($A15.5 million) in annual sales.

I have never heard of them before all this, and I can only think they are secretly loving it.

youtube should give them what they want and just pay them the $9.99 or whatever it is for a new domain and maybe a little towards a site refurb and watch as their visitor numbers and sales go down.

Hang on, I just checked something out - shouldn't they more correctly be suing universaltubes.com, they appear to have a closer name than youtube????

There is also universaltube.com doing a similar job.

Both companies do a similar job and at first glance cannot tell a different between them - this is more like passing off than anything, or are utube simply after the publicity....

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is no such thing as bad publicity" ?

Yeah, that's what I told my mom after she found those pictures of me on the internets...

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Spacejock]

They ought to upgrade their webserver account and plaster Google adwords all over the first page. Probably make from from that the plastic pipes, and even if they don't the revenue would no doubt fund the server upgrade.

I can't help thinking there are thousands, nay millions, of companies worldwide who would just love to have this problem. Okay, so the traffic is mostly teens looking for vids of people hurting themselves in new and interesting ways, but traffic is traffic. Maybe sell little iPod couches made out of plastic tubes, eh?

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

Can we have figures from before youtube arrived?

Here you go

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Pinkfud]

Indeed, I would just love it if my sites got accidental traffic. I don't make them just to sit idle, after all. Personally, I wish there was no "trademark" issue with domain names. I actually worry about one of mine, because someone else has the dot-com, while I own the dot-net, dot-info and dot-us versions. I fear that someday I'll get in crap over that just because people love to start trouble.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[forgotten_my_nick]

I would be interested to know how many of those hits where from spambots.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[orangeyoda]

So looking at the usage statistics, they actually got a web page impressions boost from YouTube. Hard to sell that as a reduction in views.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[yendor]

It seems trafic was almost non existant in Jan 2006 and before...
When did youtube start again?

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[jlarocco]

Do you realize what utube.com sells? It's not consumer goods like iPods or DVDs. It's industrial pipe and tube equipment. I would be shocked if they were getting any extra sales from the increased hits. An industrial strength lathe or shear welder isn't the kind of thing you buy on a whim while looking for videos on the internet.

Which isn't to say they don't like the extra publicity. But the image on their front page would use almost 8 terabytes (122K * 68 million) a month all by itself. I don't know what that level of hosting costs, but it's probably not cheap and it's probably a lot more expensive than what their competitors are paying.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't so much the pictures of you, John, as troops' response on the Drudge Report that belies GP's claim.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Registered Coward v2]

How many of those hits were proper customers? Can we have figures from before youtube arrived? how many turned into customers after they hit the wrong domain?

How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company):

Universal Tube, based in suburban Perrysburg and founded in 1985, has about $US12 million ($A15.5 million) in annual sales.

I have never heard of them before all this, and I can only think they are secretly loving it.


Why would they be glad to get so much traffic that their sales staff and customers find it hard to use the site? their site is designed to let people who want to buy pipe buy it; more hits from disinterested surfers is not going to result in more sales.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Giometrix]

No accidental visitor to utube.com (looking for youtube.com) is going to buy the products sold on utube.com. Youtube's popularity only raised utube's hosting fees and diminished its brand name (granted, I don't think it was ever a household name). That being said, owning the rights to utube is a godsend. Pick a different name for the core company (hell, they don't even need to continue with their core company, they could make a killing off of the utube name) and load utube.com with ads. They're sitting on a gold mine and they're trying to go after gold through litigation instead of through a little (very little) ingenuity.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Skater]

Except it costs you more money, too - you need a bigger pipe and a better server to handle the extra hits - and 99% of those incorrect hits aren't ever going to generate revenue.

Now, I don't think suing over it is the answer...

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Andy Dodd]

"How many of those hits were proper customers? Can we have figures from before youtube arrived? how many turned into customers after they hit the wrong domain?"

Very few, most likely. Did you bother to look at Universal Tube's site? They sell large, expensive machinery that very few site visitors are going to have an interest in, let alone be able to afford. In short, it's a low-volume high-profit market they're in.

"How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company):"

That's Universal Tube's complaint. They are getting massive amounts of hits from misdirected traffic that are not generating them any sales, and more importantly, EVERY HIT COSTS THEM MONEY in terms of site downtime because their site can't handle the traffic and massively increased bandwidth bills. Upgrade their hosting plan? That costs money, serious money which gives Universal Tube no return on their investment because the increased traffic does not generate them customers.

To put it simply - Via domain name confusion, YouTube is conducting an unintentional distributed denial of service attack against Universal Tube. Does that make more sense to you?

"Hang on, I just checked something out - shouldn't they more correctly be suing universaltubes.com, they appear to have a closer name than youtube????

There is also universaltube.com doing a similar job.

Both companies do a similar job and at first glance cannot tell a different between them - this is more like passing off than anything, or are utube simply after the publicity...."

A misdirect from universaltube.com to utube.com would have a high probability of generating new sales for utube.com for that exact reason. Also, the amount of traffic going to universaltube.com is most likely low, and so any misdirects that do occur will be insignificant even if they don't generate sales (which as I said before, is far more likely for those misdirects.)

Universal Tube isn't after publicity - In fact, their fundamental complaint is that YouTube has caused them unwanted publicity that is costing them money but is not increasing their sales.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[scumbaguk]

"How many of those hits were proper customers? Can we have figures from before youtube arrived? how many turned into customers after they hit the wrong domain?

How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company):"

Sure I'm online to watch some video, oh shit wrong address why don't I buy a tube manufacturing machine while I'm here.

Come on engage your brain while you post.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[codeviking]

What I'd like to know is this: how does a different website prevent your customers from getting to yours? I just googled utube and had no problem finding them (as they were the first search result). This reeks of stupid.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Tekzel]

You know, I was starting to get worried that everyone posting here was going to completely miss the point. What in the heck good is 10 million hits if 99.8% of them are stupid teenagers that have no interest what so ever in their product, also preventing their REAL customers from actually accessing the site unless they spend a lot of money to upgrade the server JUST so the same customers they had before can actually get in?

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[kdemetter]

so they are suing Youtube because the traffic they get isn't bringing them more sales , but it does cost them ?

Well there is an easy solution : create a small front page wich just say something like ( click here to continue , or click here if you wanted to visit Youtube ) , than place some ads below that . Instead of losing money , they will now gain money from the ads .

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[1u3hr]

How can a company with such massive hit numbers draw so little in sales (especially since they are a real company)

Because they're selling "Used Pipe Mills and Used Rollforming Machines". People loooking for Britney Spears upskirt videos are rarely in the market for gigantic steel milling machines.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[wyverspur]

No, No

They make universal tubes the internet runs on.

*ducks*

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Mr. Slippery]

how does a different website prevent your customers from getting to yours?

Have you ever heard of something called the "slashdot effect", by which one site linking to anyother can overwhelm it?

This is overwhelming utube.com in a very similar way. Except that it's ongoing, not just a few hours long, and is destroying their business.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Andy Dodd]

"Well there is an easy solution : create a small front page wich just say something like ( click here to continue , or click here if you wanted to visit Youtube ) , than place some ads below that . Instead of losing money , they will now gain money from the ads ."

No they won't. They'll gain a miniscule amount of money from the ads, and will lose a potentially significant number of sales because their website would no longer look professional, but would look X-10ish instead.

A reputable company expecting to make sales to industrial customers putting up random banner ads is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. Purchasing people at any potential customer of Universal Tube would instantly consider looking elsewhere if utube's site were covered in random banner ads.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[masklinn]

What I'd like to know is this: how does a different website prevent your customers from getting to yours?

Because it amounts to a DDOS attack: the UTube website gets a massive amount of misdirecte traffic from YouTube, which it isn't able to handle. UTube's website crawls to a halt, their servers burn in flames, ...

They change the server, get a new bigger pipe to the intarwebs, and it also gets hammered and destroyed.

Repeat twice more, and you may understand why they're starting to get pissed: they have to invest money to create a traffic which they don't need and which won't ever bring them any money in the first place...

This is akin to the Slashdot effect, or a Farking, but with more long-term detrimental effects (it's a permanenet slashdot effect, in a way).

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Krandor3]

According to www.utube.com they only launched their website on April 21 2006 which would be after youtube started. So I don't think they have a case here. It isn't like they were around years before youtube came into the picture. Their website isn't even a year old.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[jtev]

They don't sell pipe. They purchase, refurbish, and sell the machines that make pipes and tubing. An even more niche market. If I were them, I'd be upset about the sudden increase in traffic to.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[the_lesser_gatsby]

But if they can make more money (or more accurately if the increase of the company's NPV is greater) from random banner ads than their core business then they have a legal duty to their shareholders to do so.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Andy Dodd]

Have you ever heard a privately owned company? Not every company in existence is publically traded, and hence not every company has such a legal responsibility. In fact, probably most companies of the size of Universal Tube are in the privately owned category.

And, as I said in my previous post, their potential loss of sales in their core business from putting banner ads on their page is going to be far more than the miniscule amount of ad revenue gained, thus *IF* they did happen to be publically traded and have such obligations to increase revenue, putting banner ads on their site would be a surefire way to get sued by their shareholders.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[foobsr]

Date first seen December 1996 -> http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.utube.com

CC.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[MS-06FZ]

Except it costs you more money, too - you need a bigger pipe

Wait a minute... don't these people make pipes? If they strung together a series of their tubes, I bet it just might work...

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[dthree]

So the owner of Universal Tube complained that his site was crippled when it got 68 million hits for all of august. Yet they were able to manage 20-million hits in one day - the day the news article about them hit the web.

Should they be suing every news website? The entire blogosphere? Maybe they are just suing google to see if they will settle by hosting utube.com for them.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[epee1221]

Have you ever heard of something called the "slashdot effect", by which one site linking to anyother can overwhelm it?

Actually, the site seems to be performing just fine despite the supposed traffic bog-down.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[jrockway]

Have you looked at their website? It's just a static page saying "call us for details". Their business can do fine without the website.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Registered Coward v2]

They don't sell pipe. They purchase, refurbish, and sell the machines that make pipes and tubing.

My mistake. Maybe I should have checked out utube.com (or is it youtube?)

I can see why they are upset - I worked with a company developing an online market for a small niche market; where buyers and suppliers could post catalogues / spec sheets / bid requirements; if they had to handle a sudden increase in traffic it would shutdown their business.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[geekoid]

"There is no such thing as bad publicity"

yeah, tell that to george bush...but I digress.

utube makes manufacturing tubes. Not many people(if any) looking for youtube are going to buy from this site. If they had 'impulse items' then maybe.

What they should do is put google ads up. Or add some sort of cute ipuls item. Like utube hats, key chains and mugs.
If they could get 10% of the hits to buy impulse items they could get out of the manufaturing business!

I can garantee you thay didn't even get 1,000,000 hits a year befire youtube. If they were getting that manu, they would ahve more the 17 employees. They would be one of the larges industrial tube manufacturers on the globe if they got that many hit.
I don't think the total orders for ALL industrial tubing through the world come to 68,000,000 orders a month!

However youtube isn't liable and more then Apple is liable for not selling apples.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[monkeydo]

That's just not true. A company is in no way obligated to do whatever makes the most money for its shareholders.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[benplaut]

FTFA:
Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation said the cost of hosting its website - utube.com - has grown significantly in the last two months.

No duh. Then again, this is just a $10 lawsuit:
The lawsuit, filed this week in US District Court, asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com or pay Universal Tube's cost for creating a new domain. It did not specify damages.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, right now it's a site just saying "Service Unavailable".

Maybe Slashdot will get added to the list of defendants :-)

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[mrchaotica]

So you're saying they should switch from refurbishing pipe-making equipment to cybersquatting?

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[Znork]

Of course, the actual breakdown would probably be more like 0.05% customers, 0.45% teenagers mistyping youtube, and 99.5% people who've heard utubes complaints and head over to the site to see what they're about, wonder what they do in more detail, or just want to see if the poor webserver is slow or not.

Personally, I doubt they'l get much out of a lawsuit; their own public complaints have generated vastly more traffic (and 'free' publicity) than any random misdirected traffic.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[rainman_bc]

If I were them, I'd be upset about the sudden increase in traffic to.

If I were them I'd put the domain up for sale and probably make more money than I ever could from my day to day operations.

More than enough IMO to cover the cost to change company name.

Maybe even youtube.com would buy my domain name.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[rainman_bc]

That's just not true. A company is in no way obligated to do whatever makes the most money for its shareholders.

Considering the Board of Directors is elected by the shareholders, I beg to differ. The board of directors is responsible for fulfilling the mandate of shareholders, and quite frankly they all just want to make money. Few invest for just the hell of it. And since the President is responsible to the board of directors, I'll argue that all companies that have shareholders are obliged to make money for them.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[dotgain]

They'll probably start a whole new lawsuit with all these hits coming in with 'slashdot.org' as the referrer...

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[p3d0]

And a bona fide web site as early as 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20001201190500/http://w ww.utube.com/

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[neomajic]

Maybe they were searching youtube.com for videos on how to make your own bong? http://youtube.com/watch?v=9ShsSb7gRig http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cqDFqIh1HA&mode=re lated&search= Then they could order their parts from utube.com

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[monkeydo]

You can argue whatever you like. But you can't make up legal duties:

"They have a legal duty to their shareholders," is not a true statement.

And it also isn't true that all companies that have shareholders are obliged to make money for them. You may wish it were, you may argue that it is, but it isn't.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[the_lesser_gatsby]

In English common law a company has a fiducary duty to act in the best interests of the shareholders.Maximizing the NPV (net present value) of a company is definitely in the best interests of the shareholders.

If an NPV analysis of the switch to banner ads shows a clear benefit (not at all certain!) they have to do it or risk a lawsuit.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[monkeydo]

You're still wrong, even before we get to a discussion of the business-judgement rule. The duty that you are claiming, simply doesn't exist. There is no duty on the part of the Directors to maximize short term profits or value. Yes, Directors have a fiduciary duty to the corporation, but that only speaks to the standard by which their behavior and decision making process will be judged, it doesn't impose any obligation to make particular decisions.

If you were correct, then shareholders would be suing directors for all the potentially profitable things that companies aren't doing. You would also have a lawsuit everytime a corporation gave money to charity.

There certainly are folks who think that there should be such a duty, or that this idea should guide all corporate decision making, but there is no such legal duty.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[the_lesser_gatsby]

A quote from your link:

"...(2) that the decisions of the directors lacks a rational basis. Courts often analyze the rational basis requirement as part of the director's duty of good faith."

Passing up business strategies that increase shareholder value (not necessarily short-term profits) is irrational behavior for a company director. If the directors gave up selling their pipe stuff and played golf all day on expenses do you think the shareholders wouldn't sue as the stock price plunged?

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[monkeydo]

While it may seem like a high standard, "Rational Basis" is generally one of lowest standards of judicial review. It basically means that they had a reason. It doesn't have to be a good reason, you don't have to agree with the logic of it, and it doesn't have to pan out. Essentially, it rules out "wimsy".

Even if you hold the Directors to a higher standard, like say, "A really, really, good reason," there are good reasons to do things, other than profit. Companies buy art to decorate their walls, they buy nice carpets when cheap ones would be just as functional, they pay executives exorbitant salaries without considering direct cost benefit. They're allowed to do all of these things.

If your theory were correct, then there would be no non-profit corporations, there would be no corporate giving, and every company would simply change their market with the prevaling winds.

Re:There is no such thing as bad publicity

[jtev]

and why should they have to when their customers have been using the same website for 10 years. I understand that shit happens, but this really is not the sort of thing someone would expect, especialy when they've had their business going for so long.

Obligatory

[RichPowers]

"Universal Tube, which sells used machines that make tubes..." Well now we know who built the backbone of the Internets

Re: Obligatory

[ben there...]

Al Gore should sue them. We all know he invented the tubes.

Re: Obligatory

[Buzz_Litebeer]

And the obligatory, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, it was all a Republican spin job lie. Al Gore helped in the creation of the internet from a monetary and financial standpoint, the people that did make the internet agree with this position.

Re: Obligatory

[araemo]

Actually, there's video record of him saying he 'took the initiative' in securing the funding to 'allow' the internet to be created - in slightly more flowery language. He really does try to make it sound like he's responsible for the internets.

And hell, it may be true that without the money he helped approve, the internet might not be what it is today..

but that still doesn't mean he isn't a pompous git. ;)

Re: Obligatory

[Buzz_Litebeer]

And the obligatory, he did not say invented. :-)

Though he has taken credit for much of the funding, and those who were involved in the process agree that the civilian internet may not have taken off, at least not as early, if it was not for Gore's support.

Re:Obligatory

[dourk]

They should have built bigger tubes.

Re: Obligatory

[ben there...]

Yeah, he cosponsored some bills that "took the initiative to create the internet," to paraphrase it close enough for government work. Sounds like he did help in the creation of it to me. But we discussed that yesterday, somewhere around this place.

I still thought it was funny. ;-P

who was there first

[timmarhy]

this comes down to who was in registered first. it smacks of BUY ME BUY ME. sorry but if youtube was registered and operating before utube, then they can just fuck off.

Re:who was there first

[strider44]

You could have just read the first few paragraphs of the article. Utube was first by about 10 years apparently.

Re:who was there first

[LiquidCoooled]

universaltube.com: 1980
utube.com: 1985
universaltubes.com: 1990

all 3 do the same job and have the same name, why isn't utube suing the others and vice versa?

Re:who was there first

[Antony-Kyre]

I don't think it's about who registered their domain first. I think it really comes down to who became famous first, and who is trying to exploit whom. Is YouTube piggybacking off of Utube's fame? No, it's the other way around.

Re:who was there first

[Anonymous Coward]

Registration date
utube.com: 26-Oct-1996
youtube.com:15-Feb-2005

I think utube could probably do better by asking youtube to pay their bandwidthbill for a logo with link on utube.com, and perhaps a small additional sum for the trouble.

oh, wait. It's USA. Sue sue sue sue sue. Gimmie gimmie gimmie gimmie.

Re:who was there first

[aug24]

Actually, and I think also legally, they can just fuck off whatever. There's no trade mark restriction cos they aren't in competing markets, there was no intent to confuse, so what is the basis for restitution?

Really it's just a combination of free publicity and inconvenience that they should try to make the best of.

Justin.

Re:who was there first

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah right, the logic of slashdot is impeccable. A lawsuit means "buy our company", so this case means that Google/Youtube should buy the plastic tubes distributor. Maybe they could offer ten feet of PVC pipe free with every purchase of a million ad impressions?

Re:who was there first

[91degrees]

so what is the basis for restitution?

Harm through negligence. Youtubes very existence has resulted in a lot of traffic to utube.com, virtually none of it likely to be interested in tubing. The result has been to cost them a lot in badwidth. It's up to the court to decide whether simpyl by choosing an easily confused name, youtube were negligent.

Re:who was there first

[maxwell demon]

Given that universaltube.com is older than utube.com, it's more likely the company running universaltube.com who could sue.
Maybe a good strategy for YouTube/Google would be to offer universaltube.com to pay legal expenses if they sue utube.com ... :-)

Re:who was there first

[REBloomfield]

Because when Billy says to Jimmy check out youtube.com, Jimmy isn't going to accidentally type universaltubes.com....

Re:who was there first

[MoriaOrc]

The question the GP posed was "Why isn't utube.com (owned by Universal Tubing) suing universaltubes.com and universaltube.com, since as far as I (and most people, probably) can tell, they might as well be the same company (and definitely all three apparently different companies have the same company name).

Because when Bill the plumber says to Jim the plumber check Universal Tube's website, Jim isn't going to have any idea which of those three websites Bill is talking about....

Re:who was there first

[aug24]

I just don't accept this. There can surely be no requirement in law, or in life, to take account of other people's incompetence.

I see your point, but I think it's way beyond what a court would consider reasonable.

Justin.

Re:who was there first

[REBloomfield]

Because the issue isn't over whether there are companies with similar names, it's over the fact that the URL is similar and is causing (allegedly) unwanted traffic.

Re:who was there first

[Anonymous Coward]

There can surely be no requirement in law, or in life, to take account of other people's incompetence.

so you havent seen the labels on drain cleaner that say do not ingest, or labels on plastic bags not to be taken internaly, or electrical equipment not to be taken into the bath.

There are some requirements to take account for others incompetence

Re:who was there first

[roach13]

Actually, Universal Tube was around a lot longer. I actually heard the owner of Universal Tube on NPR about 2-3 weeks ago, sounded like a nice guy. He'd been trying to get in touch with YouTube for a while, presumably to set up some kind of arrangement that would handle their volume problems and get their customers to them while getting people looking for YouTube to the correct spot, and with the Google merger, he specifically said "I just want to get in touch with the people at Google, I think we can come to an arrangement we both like." And as to the comment "there's no such thing as bad publicity", think about this: when you own a small business and you can't keep your site up due to volume problems, you lose customers. That hurts, and can hurt a whole lot; in some cases, it's enough to drive a company under. It's not like YouTube is hurting financially now that it falls into Google's deep pockets. I'd assume this lawsuit was filed since they had been unsuccessful directly contacting Google/YouTube execs. It's a way to get their attention - I highly doubt it will make it to court.

Re:who was there first

[LiquidCoooled]

If universaltubes.com and universaltube.com and utube.com can coexist quite happily with all the name conflicts then why the hell should they be bothering about an increase in traffic from something which isn't even remotely treading on their shoes.

The extra traffic is a blessing.

Re:who was there first

[Dunbal]

Youtubes very existence has resulted in a lot of traffic to utube.com, virtually none of it likely to be interested in tubing.

      If this was true then slashdot is in for some major lawsuits. I mean harm through negligence is what we do ... oops the utube site is down...

Re:who was there first

[Dragonslicer]

The extra traffic is a blessing.

Says the person who is clearly not the one paying their hosting bills.

Re:who was there first

[Mr. Slippery]

The extra traffic is a blessing.

No, it's not. It's a slashdotting that never ends. It's destroying their ability to do business via their website.

Not every company makes its money off of ad impressions, some actually make real things. And suggesting, as some have in this thread, that a manufacturing company ought to just change, overnight, into an domain-name squatting parasite is ridiculous.

Re:who was there first

[Mr. Slippery]

There can surely be no requirement in law, or in life, to take account of other people's incompetence.

Of course there are many such requirements in law. There is for example the "attractive nuisance doctrine", and the concept of "negligent entrustment".

While neither of those would seem to apply here, it is the case that Universal Tube is suffering harm, via the endless slashdotting caused by the phonetic confusion.

Re:who was there first

[masklinn]

You, sir, are officially an idiot

Re:who was there first

[masklinn]

all 3 do the same job and have the same name, why isn't utube suing the others and vice versa?

Because the existence of universaltube.com and universaltubes.com don't DDOS utube.com on a daily basis?

Re:who was there first

[masklinn]

The extra traffic is a blessing.

Yeah, having to pay because hordes of retarded teenagers are DDOSing your website through which you're trying to sell industrial tubing machine sure is a blessing...

Re:who was there first

[masklinn]

I think utube could probably do better by asking youtube to pay their bandwidthbill for a logo with link on utube.com, and perhaps a small additional sum for the trouble.

Are you retarded? How professionnal would a corporate website look with a Youtube add on it?

Great way to make investors and potential buyers confident...

Re:who was there first

[Dun Malg]

Harm through negligence. Youtubes very existence has resulted in a lot of traffic to utube.com

Negligence? Don't be an idiot. What did they neglect to do? Teach morons to spell? They should be suing AOL because AIM makes dumbfucks think "you" is spelled "U".

Re:who was there first

[91degrees]

Whether this is likely to be successful or not is another matter. utube's lawyers may well be able to spin it so that it is. It certainly seems rather unfair on utube that they have suffered an effective DoS. And is it really that unexpected that so many people decide to spell the name of the company with a u? Hell, it's not like youtube actually means anything. If you hear the name, you may well think the 'u' is just an arbitary letter like the 'i' in ipod.

But really, my actual point is that they are extremely unlikely to base any claim on trademark infringement.

Re:who was there first

[mrchaotica]

Damn, you're an idiot! Universal Tube doesn't want fame. Fame hurts their business, because they have to pay more to serve their website to people who have no possibility whatsoever of buying their products!

Re:who was there first

[dotgain]

Hehe, I just popped over to "eyepod.com", sure as hell some hopeful squatter has it.

Re:who was there first

[MoriaOrc]

As far as I know, there's no law against making a web sight hosted on a URL that is similar to another (domain squaters demonstrate this every day). If they're having a big problem with the traffic, they could do something like what http://www.firefox.com/ has done, put a minimalistic main page that says something like "Looking for YouTube.com? Go Here: [youtube.com], or continue to our page about tube manufacturing: [utube.com/main]" It could even be a very light text-based page if they wanted to really cut down on bandwidth.

The point I was trying to make in my first post was that their argument seems to be "They have a similar name, we were here first, and we don't like it" when in fact, as others have pointed out, there are two other companies with much more similar names that would probably confuse their target market, and take away from bussiness. It's a shame that youtube's growth has hurt them, but there are certainly other solutions then a legal battle in which they seem to be the underdog.

publicity stunt

[speculatrix]

this sounds like a simple case of getting publicity by suing a big name!

meanwhile, on the other news channel, I am suing google for US$1M for no other reason than that Google have more money than me, and thus Google are causing me to feel anxiety about my relative poverty.

Re:publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

this sounds like a simple case of a guy using an exclamation point!

Re:publicity stunt

[dubiousmike]

they should have bought the different incarnations of their domain name a long time ago. People have been buying spelling mistake and phonetic combinations of their domain name like everyone else if they were worried about this years ago like other responsible companies have been doing for a long time. Tough titties.

Re:publicity stunt

[masklinn]

Publicity? For a seller of used industrial tubing machines? Dear god how stupid can you guys get?

Re:publicity stunt

[speculatrix]

if I ever need some machines for doing stuff to tubes, I'll probably remember these guys.. and make sure I go somewhere else as they're clueless and greedy idiots!

What about...

[SnowZero]

How long before they go after ewetube?

I know, that was baaaaad.

Re:What about...

[aerthling]

The owners of that domain will probably feel a bit sheepish if they do.

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats just a link 'farm'.

Re:What about...

[ozmanjusri]

The owners of that domain will probably feel a bit sheepish if they do.

I don't know wether that's true. they're more likely to tell them to ram it.

Re:What about...

[muellerr1]

I bet if there's enough money involved, they'll ram it through anyway.

Re:What about...

[muellerr1]

I should really think a bit longer before I post. I passed up a great opportunity to talk about fleecing and pulling the wool over their eyes.

Re:What about...

[johansalk]

That video on ewetube was a masterpiece. I loved it.

obviously

[macadamia_harold]

Well now we know who built the backbone of the Internets

Obviously, because the internet is clearly not a truck, that you can just dump things on.

Re:obviously

[Feanturi]

Of course it's not a truck, everyone knows that data takes the bus.

Re:obviously

[mpoulton]

MOD PARENT FUNNY! It's a geeky joke all of us should get. It ought to roffle your woffles. Data... bus... nevermind. The quality of geeks is really declining these days.

Re:obviously

[morgan_greywolf]

The quality of geeks is really declining these days.

You missed a word in that sentence. s/geeks/geeks on Slashdot/

(YouTube + slashdot) utube

[SuperBigGulp]

And now that utube has just been slashdotted things can't be looking up for Universal Tube.

Qualifiers

[Chief Camel Breeder]

In the UK at least, one frquently sees trademarks as "qualified names" with text in parentheses added to disambiguate. Thus, J Bloggs & Co (plumbers) and J Bloggs Ltd. (greengrocers) can both use their names as trademarks. I suspect that the one who registers later gets forced to use the qualifier and the original J Bloggs doesn't have to.

Were this extended to domains, then YouTube would be in trouble. They'd have to add a qualifier to their domain name; meaning, of course a new domain.

Re:Qualifiers

[CmdrGravy]

In Wales they do the same thing, everyone is called Jones but they differentiate by calling each other Jones e.g. Jones The Drunk, Jones The Heroin, Jones The Fence, Jones The Raper etc etc

Re:Qualifiers

[orangeyoda]

Gets a bit long winded though Jones the Sheep Shagger (from Carnarvon Just down from the Hen and Ducks ) Seriously, my grandfarther was called Dai the Bread, his brother Dai the Milk , and thier old school chum, Dai the post. Dai the Developer

Re:Qualifiers

[maxwell demon]

But they have qualified their name, by putting 'yo' in front of it. Is it their fault that people don't speak that 'yo' if they refer to the site? :-)

Re:Qualifiers

[javaxjb]

Windows (the BSOD) anyone? Or Vista (The Tardy) since Vista (the Cruiser) was in the 60s?

In related news

[coolcold]

youtube sues Utube for lost of profit due to lost traffic.

CC

This is stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

The company, [...] got 68 million hits on its site in August, making it one of the most popular manufacturing websites.

I really see no reason for whinge. Maybe being thankfulk... but suing because you moved your site 10 times to avoid ~70 million hist per Month? That's retarded... The first thing I would have done would have been downsizing all png's as good as I can... and add a friendly link to youtube on the frontpage.

Sheesh...

Re:This is stupid...

[mabinogi]

Maybe if they had less than 107 images on their front page they wouldn't have so much of a problem.

Re:This is stupid...

[cliffski]

wow a site called websiteoptimisation thats mega-slow AND doesn't work on firefox?
Thats l33t.

Re:This is stupid...

[cliffski]

actually I take that back, now its working its quite cool, albeit under IE.

Re:This is stupid...

[Elminst]

The GP link is slow because it's linking to analyze the utube site.
the parent url of http://www.websiteoptimization.com/ is quite fast, actually.

Re:This is stupid...

[masklinn]

add a friendly link to youtube on the frontpage.

On an industrial corporate website? Dear slashdot, I would so wish that you had a clue.

Re:This is stupid...

[mabinogi]

what about it doesn't work with Firefox?

I used the firefox WebDeveloper plugin to automatically submit the site.

In fact, I've only ever used it with Firefox

Common sense will prevail

[Antony-Kyre]

You have to ask yourself. Whose fame came first? YouTube or Utube?

If Utube came first, then yes, this is valid if YouTube is exploiting their fame. However, this isn't the case, if I'm not mistaken. YouTube is the one that is famous. Utube is the one that is trying to extort money from YouTube.

To give another example, imagine if I created a site with a name similar to Microsoft, and whenever someone Googled Microsoft, my domain would come up, and a significant number of people came to me first.

Re:Common sense will prevail

[kubla2000]

To give another example, imagine if I created a site with a name similar to Microsoft, and whenever someone Googled Microsoft, my domain would come up, and a significant number of people came to me first. No, it would be more like if you had a company named Microsort which was founded in 1975 and offered paper sorting services and after the sudden appearence of a software maker named Microsoft your paper sorting company's website got swamped my misdirected traffic. In my view, neither your Microsort nor Universal Tube have a leg to stand on.

Re:Common sense will prevail

[bblboy54]

You can't Google Microsoft.... well, I guess you could but it's not safe if any chairs are around.

Re:Common sense will prevail

[Raideen]

To give another example, imagine if I created a site with a name similar to Microsoft, and whenever someone Googled Microsoft, my domain would come up, and a significant number of people came to me first.

That's not exactly the case. utube.com existed before youtube.com--utube.com isn't trying to exploit YouTube's fame. It's more like Nissan Computer vs. Nissan Motors.

Re:Common sense will prevail

[ivan256]

You don't have to ask who came first because both of them operate in different industries. They could probably both register exactly the same trademarked name, but since one would have to specify their business as digital video hosting and the other as industrial tubing manufacturing, they could both co-exist because it is technically impossible for one of those companies to take the other's business. Their product lines don't overlap.

Re:Common sense will prevail

[boarder]

So in your world, relative fame determines whether you are right or wrong?

That's interesting.

Maybe that's why a celebrity drunk driver gets community service while a normal person gets jail time. Or why Michael Jackson and OJ didn't get convicted.

On the internet, how famous your domain name is doesn't matter. It is who had the domain first and whether the two trademarked names compete in the same industry. Utube had their domain long before Youtube, IIRC; but they don't compete in the same market. I'm guessing this will get dismissed.

Even Nissan cars vs. nissan.com had a stronger legal footing than this lawsuit, but Nissan cars lost.

Re:Common sense will prevail

[Antony-Kyre]

That is not the same thing.

Is Utube.com really hurt because of YouTube.com?

In related news...

[sssmashy]

The Amazon tribe of Brazil has sued Amazon.com for $1,000,000,000, complaining that they have potentially lost hundreds of dollars in sales of beads and feminine hygiene products while having to deal with dozens of accidental hits to their website.

More sues

[VincenzoRomano]

I'd suggest Utube to also sue ntube, mtube, cuetube and so on.
Because they have customers so deeply confused by mistyping and misreading, they need to get as much cash as possible out of anything in order to remain alive in the market.

Re:More sues

[Bloke down the pub]

I was just going to register http://www.pootube.com/, but it's taken. To go back on topic, so is http://www.suetube.com/.

Eh?

[Spad]

Remind me to sue my neighbours for their house being #41. People are always knocking on my door (#41a) instead, wasting my time and causing a loss of earnings.

After all, it's clearly their fault that people are idiots.

Re:Eh?

[SpaghettiPattern]

Remind me to sue my neighbours for their house being #41.

I take the fact your neighbours are wealthy and that you're not to be a mere coincidence.

Re:Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's clearly their fault that people are idiots

Under big government, it is.

There's a reason why people in this country can sue each other for slipping on wet sidewalks, and it's certainly not because they live under constitutionally limited government which serves only to protect them against actual force and fraud.

Re:Eh?

[scumbaguk]

You might want to consider it if so many people are ringging on your door bell that you are having to replace the button every other day due to wear and your electricity bill has gone up about 10 million times due to the constant buzzes.

Re:Eh?

[spiritraveller]

Remind me to sue my neighbours for their house being #41. People are always knocking on my door (#41a) instead, wasting my time and causing a loss of earnings.

Your address numbers are not chosen by you.

Even if they are, the address has to be something in sequence. I assume that 42 was already taken when your lot was carved out.

Re:Eh?

[wile_e8]

Remind me to sue my neighbours for their house being #41a. People are always knocking on my door (#41) instead, wasting my time and causing a loss of earnings. After all, it's clearly their fault that people are idiots.

Re:Eh?

[nacturation]

Remind me to sue my neighbours for their house being #41. People are always knocking on my door (#41a) instead, wasting my time and causing a loss of earnings.

A more accurate analogy would be that you moved in first and called your address "Forty 1" whereas they moved in later and called their address "Forty Won", a homonym of yours. Given their widespread popularity, when people go to visit "Forty Won" they mistakenly think it's "Forty 1" and beat down your door.

Re:Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually addresses with "a" or "b" are shitty basement apartments or the like. (To paraphrase Tyler Durden)

I've never seen an actual house on a lot with a "subaddress" letter. They usually leave enough numbers between the houses to add one here and there if someone splits a parcel up.

Google Provides Servers?

[Psychotext]

I can't help thinking that the best thing Google could do on this is provide the server needs for utube.com to function whilst being hammered by the people incorrectly hitting the site. I don't think they would have much to complain about after that... though I'm sure that probably wouldn't stop them.

Re:Google Provides Servers?

[niceone]

I can't help thinking that the best thing Google could do on this is provide the server needs for utube.com to function whilst being hammered by the people incorrectly hitting the site. I don't think they would have much to complain about after that...

Hey this is Slashdot! Take your sensible, logical and fair proposal and shove it! We don't assume people have resonable motives for suing around here!

though I'm sure that probably wouldn't stop them.

Ah, that's better.

Re:Google Provides Servers?

[SavvyPlayer]

Except Google is not in the business of hosting arbitrary vertical ecommerce sites. Properly building such a business unit and entering into open-ended agreements with arbitrary businesses would likely cost more than establishing a legal precedent here.

Re:Google Provides Servers?

[TubeSteak]

I can't help thinking that the best thing Google could do on this is provide the server needs for utube.com to function whilst being hammered by the people incorrectly hitting the site.

That's a nice gesture, but it isn't what utube really wants.
FTFA:
"Girkins [Universal Tube's president] has said the company was looking to sell the web address and find a new home for its website."

Translation: For a lot of money, YouTube can have our domain & we'll pack it up somewhere else.

utube has a ligitimate problem though, and I don't think this lawsuit is malicious, since they aren't asking for damages, just cost.

Re:Google Provides Servers?

[Ben Hutchings]

utube has a ligitimate problem though, and I don't think this lawsuit is malicious, since they aren't asking for damages, just cost.

That's what "damages" means - the cost of putting things right. ("Punitive damages" are an exception to this, and the phrase is arguably oxymoronic.) But I don't think YouTube has done anything wrong. Shit happens.

Re:Google Provides Servers?

[WhatsAProGingrass]

Google should not have to pay anything to them. UTube should buy a new domain name called UniversalTubes.com . YouTube and UTube are two different things. When UTube bought the domain name, the rules were the same. I bought http://www.whatsapro.com/ , I know that someone can easily buy whatapro.com or whatsapros.com . I know this ahead of time and If I cared, i would just buy those names too.

Re:Google Provides Servers?

[Dolly_Llama]

As the market matures, it makes sense to me that business insurance should cover unexpected things like this that impact business.

Dammit

[Rogerborg]

Next they'll come for my site about ovine obstetrics, ewetube.com

Re:Dammit

[Dunbal]

Next they'll come for my site about ovine obstetrics, ewetube.com

      I am warning ALL of you. Stop. Now!

      Owner of YewTube.com,
      Inquire about our genuine wooden tubular products today!

UTube could make a fortune

[giafly]

...by simply adding Google ads to their homepage.

Most sites would kill to get this level of traffic, and all these guys can think of is getting it stopped.

Re:UTube could make a fortune

[91degrees]

It might be seen as domain squatting if they decided to do that though. Perhaps google might offer a per-click fee for a link to youtube as a settlement, depending on how non-evil they're feeling...

Re:UTube could make a fortune

[Rithiur]

According to the article, Universal tube seems to be willing to move to a new domain (provided that Youtube pays the expenses). I don't see why they couldn't simply sell the utube.com to the highest bidder and get rid of it. I'm sure a domain with 60+ million hits a month is worth quite a lot.

Or maybe they are just trying to get few extra bucks from Google's pocket too.

Re:UTube could make a fortune

[mysidia]

According to the article, Universal tube seems to be willing to move to a new domain (provided that Youtube pays the expenses). I don't see why they couldn't simply sell the utube.com to the highest bidder and get rid of it. I'm sure a domain with 60+ million hits a month is worth quite a lot.

There is genuine confusion here, between the two names -- if you just pheonetically say "You Tube dot com", the listener can't tell the difference. The proper party for Utube.com to be sold to use Youtube.com, then it can just be made to point to the main site.

Re:UTube could make a fortune

[Pollardito]

There is genuine confusion here, between the two names -- if you just pheonetically say "You Tube dot com", the listener can't tell the difference. The proper party for Utube.com to be sold to use Youtube.com, then it can just be made to point to the main site.

it's not even any better in the south, every time they type in yalltube.com it gets them to an equally useless tube-related site

Re:UTube could make a fortune

[likes2comment]

Yeah, http://www.yatube.net/ is for those other people who speak with an accent.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Domain names and trademarks should be entirely separate namespaces. Thanks for asking.

Obvious solution.

[SharpFang]

Google should now buy out utube. Certainly a good deal, after all they've been buying out all the dark fiber, now they'd have even more pipes for the intarnets.

Re:Icons are incorrect for story

[drawfour]

Did the World Wildlife Fund sue the World Wrestling Federation? No, they simply put a link on their site pointing people to the other site if they mistakingly stumbled across it. utube and youtube should just do the same.

Is simple fact-checking really that hard? Try reading this wikipedia article about the world wildlife fund, and be sure to read the section labeled "Lawsuit". Yes, the World Wildlife Fund did sue the World Wrestling Federation, leading to the name change to World Wrestling Entertainment. It happened in British courts.

UTube/You Tube

[clarkec321]

Quite some time ago i visited utube by mistake, I wondered what all the fuss was about and how does this website have a hundred million downloads a day So if it wasn't for youtube I'd never be aware there was a company called utube

Re:UTube/You Tube

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, yeah, that's exactly what they're complaining about: People visiting their website by mistake.

It's like having a phone number that is very similar to the phone number of the local pizza place.

Re:UTube/You Tube

[Anonymous Coward]

And the solution to that is to change your phone number, not sue the pizza place.

Let me get this straight...

[Klaidas]

They're mad because their servers couldn't stand against traffic?

Re:Let me get this straight...

[scumbaguk]

Yeah because everytime I spec a server selling tubing manufacturing equipment expecting maybe 20 vists a day I spec it so it can handle 68 million a day. Makes so much economic sense.

Only need a beowulf cluster :P

Re:Let me get this straight...

[ciggieposeur]

They're mad because their servers couldn't stand against traffic?

If you had a site designed for quick service to 1000 visitors/day that cost perhaps $1000/month, and it ran fine for 10 years, would you be a little pissed when it suddenly got 1,000,000 visitors every hour and fell over?

What if Slashdot, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Clipmarks, and a few others decided between themselves that they would always refer to your site every other day such that you never get it back online? That is in essence what uTube.com is suffering: an eternal Slashdot effect.

If uTube.com put up a page that says "Fuck YouTube.com!", how long do you think until Google had a lawyer send a C&D?

If your town lacks zoning laws, and your next-door neighbor puts a casino in their backyard, do you think you'll have legal recourse against them for the noise it generates every night? (Answer: yes.)

The pragmatic thing to do here is to register a new domain for Universal Tube (abandoning the name that has served well for ten years), directing traffic to either youtube.com or the new domain, and then getting Google to shell out some $$$ for the costs of the change. Youtube.com should have known when they registered their domain that lots of people might mistype the name and knock out their Internet neighbor, so they bear some responsibility in fixing the situation now that that is indeed what happened.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Eivind]

Nah. Not all that mad.

I'd buy a hosting-plan capable of dealing with it, and put up sufficient advertising to more than pay for the needed bandwith and servers.

Thereafter, let the floodgates open. The more people visit, the more money I make. Simple really.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[MS-06FZ]

What if Slashdot, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Clipmarks, and a few others decided between themselves that they would always refer to your site every other day such that you never get it back online?

Don't be silly. I mean, Slashdot, posting the same thing day after day? That's nonsense.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd buy a hosting-plan capable of dealing with it,

Uh-huh. And just what kind of plan will allow essentially unlimited traffic for a fixed monthly price? Either they are immediate bandwidth capped (shutting out their legitimate customers) or they are total bandwidth capped (shutting out their legitimate customers).

and put up sufficient advertising to more than pay for the needed bandwith and servers.

First, when your site doesn't have advertising and then it suddenly does, you piss off legitimate customers. Second, if uTube.com tried to rake in money from the brand recognition of youtube.com, you can bet that Google.com would be suing them into oblivion because that is Google's trademark making that money, not Universal Tubes. Same reason you'll never see a Ford toothbrush, or Honda cigarettes. That money is not theirs to make.

For a 5-digit UID, one would think you'd be a bit smarter than a moron.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Ben Hutchings]

If you had a site designed for quick service to 1000 visitors/day that cost perhaps $1000/month, and it ran fine for 10 years, would you be a little pissed when it suddenly got 1,000,000 visitors every hour and fell over?

I'd be pretty pissed at paying that much in the first place. My web sites get about 1700 visitors per day and before I started hosting them at home I was paying $7/month for hosting.

1 million visitors per hour would be difficult to handle on a single server but I'd expect $1000/month to pay for enough hardware and bandwidth to cover it, assuming sensible use of static resources (most of the visitors will only ever see the front page).

Re:Let me get this straight...

[mrchaotica]

And then you go out of business because you pissed off all your real customers with the advertising! Seriously, if you were a procurement officer for some company looking to buy industrial equipment, which vendor would seem more reputable: one with a professional-looking website, or one with random banner ads strewn all over it?!

Re:Let me get this straight...

[ciggieposeur]

You may pay $7 to the hosting provider, but I'm sure you pay yourself quite a lot more in hours.

$1000/month total business cost means $100 per month ISP + 30 hours @ $30 hour per month. That's only about 8-10 hours per week, or 1 full-time day, for the maintainer of the site.

Assuming even the bandwidth is still only $100 a month, can you set up a site that will handle 1 million visitors per hour and only spend 1 day a week maintaining it?

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Ben Hutchings]

I don't see that the ongoing cost of updating information on the site is going to go up because there are huge numbers of people mistakenly going to the home page. They don't need any new information beyond a link saying "Looking for video? Try YouTube.com."

Re:Icons are incorrect for story

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did the World Wildlife Fund sue the World Wrestling Federation? No, they simply put a link on their site pointing people to the other site if they mistakingly stumbled across it. utube and youtube should just do the same."

Actually, yes, yes they did. Long, sordid details aside, that's why it's now World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and not World Wrestling Federation (WWF).

Next in line: Cisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Universal Tubes actually should be suing Cisco for claiming that their routers power the Internet. Everyone knows Internet is a "Series of Tubes" and UTube manufactures the tubes.

Re:Next in line: Cisco

[maxwell demon]

Of course, Cisco routers don't power the internet. Unless they now make routers with integrated power plants. :-)

Settle the case...

[BigBuckHunter]

If I were Google, I'd simply settle the case by purchasing them two DL360's. All they have to do is serve the single homepage 2.2 million times a day (68 mil hits month /30 days a month. As long as the homepage is static content (looks like a bajillion gif images), they'll be fine.

BBH

Re:Settle the case...

[rickb928]

Sport over the bandwidth, and it's all good.

Of course, the bandwidth will cost more than the 360's. Each and every month.

Maybe a couple of Xserves would be better... Bandwidth still needed.

-rick

Re:Settle the case...

[multipartmixed]

Actually, they should just offer to host the front page for them.. Google can afford the bandwidth...

Re:Settle the case...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem its not the hardware, is the BANDWITH.

Illiteracy

[Petronius.Scribe]

Rather than sueing YouTube, why don't they sue the marketing morons who decided that "u" made a good abbreviation for "you" in product names and marketing campaigns? If people didn't automatically skip the y and o then this wouldn't be an issue.

Re:Illiteracy

[Orange Crush]

Plz, that shud come l8er. U'd think 1st thing 2 do is sue AOL.

Re:Illiteracy

[bigpat]

It would be more appropriate to sue the English language and alphabet, because last time I checked "u" and "you" are pronounced just about the same way, which is the problem, not marketing.

Re:Illiteracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Youtube is a stupid name anyway. Your Tube would have made more sense.

Re:Illiteracy

[StikyPad]

Or rather than sueing them, we could try suing them!

Re:(YouTube + slashdot) utube

[Pinkfud]

Heh, yeah. That's exactly why I never put links to my sites on here. You guys are t3h cloggers of t3h tubes!

microsoft to sue utube?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, they stole icons from windows, didn't they?

Once again ...

[yvesdandoy]

this post is completely anglophone-centric.

Authentic?

[witchgirl]

It seems to me everyone thinks this is just a way to get free advertising for Universal Tube. I just can't help but think of the amount of their bandwidth that is being sucked up by this new traffic. If they have a set limit of bandwidth and pay over a certain amount used, their bills probably amount to millions now; and the lack of banners on their frontpage indicates that they haven't decided to make money out of the new audience they get.

It is indeed interesting that they only sue after Google has set its views on YouTube, yet could it be because of this very reason? Google's name has probably raised the traffic to YouTube even more than what it was before; and handling more traffic might be a big problem with Universal Tube. After all, they had to shut down their website for several days, indeed affecting the commercial potency of their website. I would be more doubtful of more recent websites like utube.co.uk, .net or .org who seem to ride YouTube's wave.

It's the all encompassing .com that's the problem

[Colin Smith]

Hence stuff like .bank, .retail, .energy, .telecom etc etc.

ooh, the wayback machine is fabulous, here's a rant I wrote years ago about ICANN and the flatness of the current DNS system.

ICANN fuck up the worlds DNS

Well, Ok, but if you're going to call yourself ICANN then what do you expect?
Here's my DNS heirarchy diatribe.

The DNS is not being used appropriately.

It's a heirarchical system that has been abused by the registrars to the point where it's effectively a flat naming system; *.com.

End users should not have access to domains above 3rd or 4th level. First, second and maybe even the third level domains should be reserved exclusively for domain administration purposes.
Think of it as a filing system. Would you allow users to randomly create directories off root or /usr or even /home? No, only a fuckwit would do that but this is essentially what ICANN are doing. As a responsible administrator you should administer that heirarchy and create areas where users can create and access information in a consistent fashion.

An example of a managed heirarchy
microsoft.vendors.software.com
apple.vendors.software.com
opensource.vendors.software.com
ibm.vendors.software.com
microsoft.operating-systems.software.com
apple.operating-systems.software.com
open-source.operating-systems.software.com
amazon.vendors.books.com
barnes&noble.vendors.books.com
waterstones.vendors.books.com
hoover.US.trademarks.org
persil.UK.trademarks.org
fred.new-york.US.plumbers.com
tesco.superstores.shopping.com
asda.superstores.shopping.com
whsmiths.newsagents.shopping.com
menzies.newsagents.shopping.com

You see the kind of thing I mean? Web browser and other software could then make use of the structure of the heirarchy.

The DNS needs to be re-organised or even just organised. ICANN and the registrars should get off their fat arses and design the heirarchy rather than completely abdicating responsibility and allowing chaos to ensue the way they have done so far.

A properly designed heirarchy would allow everyone to have their place without all this domain squatting and trademark infringement bullshit.

The new TLDs that ICANN are proposing will simply cause more chaos. They will not solve anything. ICANN are just abdicating their responsibilities again. Do you really think that the IBMs, Microsofts and Apples of this world will not simply register their names and trademarks in every existing TLD?

They can, they will and things will only get worse.

And of course we now have phishing problems as well. Oh happy days.

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[CmdrGravy]

Claws_Of_Doom The Whinger ?

Clearly, if they can't stand the wave

[Anonymous Coward]

They need a Niagara webserver.

Ducks in a row

[Dachannien]

This story (sans lawsuit) hit the big time October 12-ish. It's amusing to note that while Universal Tube foolishly complained to the press before looking into other opportunities, there's at least one person out there who was paying a bit more attention:

$ whois universal-tube.com

      Donald Tang
      360 W 43rd St, S-8E
      New York, New York 10036
      United States

      Domain Name: UNIVERSAL-TUBE.COM
            Created on: 12-Oct-06
            Expires on: 12-Oct-07
            Last Updated on:

Re:Ducks in a row

[Facegarden]

Hah, i SO was just checking to see what different versions were still avaliable. :) Damn,
-Taylor

Why domain squatting?

[coyotecult]

Could it really be considered domain squatting if they owned the domain before the existence of youtube.com, did not sell it to someone else, have no intention of selling it to anyone else, and continue to use it for their business?

Re:Why domain squatting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

If it wasn't for youtube...

[rwa2]

I wouldn't even know about utube if I hadn't accidentally typed it in once while trying to hit youtube. And yes, this was well before this story broke. Gootube should be bargaining for ad / referral fees :P

I sure hope I don't get sued by someone someday... esp. since I occasionally get inquiries from engineering firms asking if I can build them a torque wrench, presumably after they stumble upon a web page for one of my college projects from the earlier days of the internet... http://www.google.com/search?q=F1+torque+wrench

Re:If it wasn't for youtube...

[shawngarringer]

Wow, when I open that site I can only think "welcome to 1998".

Animated gif - Check.

No CSS - Check.

Date that says last edited in 1998 - Check. :)

3 letters: W T F

[bblboy54]

First the viacom shit and now this! I remember a few months ago utube.com saying about how they liked getting the free advertising.... not in those words, but essentially. Jon Stewart and other comedy central personalities FREQUENTLY mentioned how youtube.com had boosted their viewership.... Then, google buys youtube and now all of a sudden, its trademark and copyright infringement. Next, anyone wearing any clothing with TV networks' logos on them will be immediately imprisoned.

Furthermore, Google has already told the US Government to fuck off.... If these companies want to play this immoral games why in God's name would you do it to Google?

The trademark restrictions come mostly from ICANN

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't clear that there is much trademark legislation that actually applies to domain
names. Most of the decisions relating to trademark based disputes over domain names have
been made by ICANN not judges. Trademark lawyers is one of the groups that has a lot of
influence over ICANN.
Not all of the TLDs give preference to trademark holders after the fact. For example .to
is first come first served. (Though TONIC claims to have reserved some names.) To lose
a domain in .to someone has to take you to court (or make you an offer you can't refuse)
rather than get a protrademark arbitrator to rule against you. (ICANN arbitrators are
protrademark because the plaintiff gets to pick the arbitrator and arbitrators that aren't
protrademark don't get enough business to justify continuing as an ICANN arbitrator.)

Are these people idiots?

[kbox]

If anyone wants to send me 68 million visitors a month, Please do.

Anyone with even half a brain would have upgraded thier hosting and stuck adverts on that page, They would make more money from that than they ever would with thier 'tube machines'. Not sit there complaiming about it.

Re:Are these people idiots?

[imapatsy]

Absolutely! They could have gotten a new domain for their universal tube dot com (i.e. uni-tube.com) and used utube.com to bank millions in advertising revenue. Besides, even from a trademark standpoint the U in utube clearly stands for 'Universal' and not the word 'You'. How do they figure YouTube is spinoff of UTube? They have two completely different meanings. I wouldn't be suprised if some idiot judge who can't even operate a computer, rules $1,000,000,000 against YouTube and orders the domain shutdown. Wouldn't surpose me after seeing what's happening to SpamHaus.

Re:Are these people idiots?

[Dunbal]

How do they figure YouTube is spinoff of UTube? They have two completely different meanings.

      That's ok. I'm waiting for the dust to settle before filing suit against BOTH of these bastards.

      Sincerely,

      The owner of YewTube.com,
      Inquire about our genuine wooden tubular products today!

Re:Are these people idiots?

[Mr. Slippery]

Anyone with even half a brain would have upgraded thier hosting and stuck adverts on that page

Having trouble with your website? Hey, why don't you just completely change your business model, and instead of being a company that actually makes things useful in the real world (providing valuable manufacturing jobs), just become a domain-typo squatting parasite instead?

Re:Are these people idiots?

[kbox]

Every business model is simple "make money".. I'm sute the world would continue revolving if they didnt have thier little tube machine site. Besides, What the hell do they want youtube to do about it?

Dear Slashdot,

[chowdy]

My website, ForwardSlash-Period.org is receiving few hits, and I believe we have found the culprit: your website.

I will be expecting your reply in the form of sacks marked with dollar signs.

Thank you,
ForwardSlash-Period.org

READING SKILLS. GET THEM NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the above comments you see just too many posters who just didn't read the story let alone understand it. Hell some can't even be bothered to read the summary.

So here is a check list to see if your an idiot.

• If you commented that youtube was there first or try to sound insightfull by asking wich one came first, your an idiot. The article states that utube came first by several years.
• If you claim the utube customers got confused, then you are an idiot. The problem is not utube customers finding the wrong site, it is youtube customers going to utube by mistake and putting so much traffic on the site that it goes down and costs utube too much in bandwidth.
• If you think that any hits on your site are good hits, then you are an idiot. Does the average youtube visitor sound like someone who might be in the market for some tube making equipment? Worse, there are so many non-intrested visitors that even intrested visitors cannot access the site.
• Same with the logic that this is free advertising. It ain't free, they have to pay for bandwidth just as everyone else. Imagine you sold ferrari's and some kindly soul lands you a huge bill for advertising you in a slum area. Would you be happy? Yes it is advertising but not at your target audience and possibly at a cost you cannot afford. It is the reason companies that give out free goodies do not just want to give them to anyone who asks but only to prospective customers. I would imagine that tube making equipment is not exactly something that appeals to a lot of people.

Is youtube at fault here? Well, imagine this. I own a small diner next to industrial area. Next to me opens one of these huge malls. They got their own restaurant but no toilets. So all their customers come in to use mine. Does that make me happy? Free advertising after all right? lots of customers coming through the door? Who cares if the customer I had been getting who actually bought my food now stay away because there is always a line in front of the toilet.

YouTube is causing an accidental nuisance, not though any evil intent but that doesn't mean the inconvenience is any less. If youtube was a "do no evil" company (like who would ever believe a company with that motto) they would offer to handle the part of the hosting cost caused by youtube visitors entering the wrong domain.

It shouldn't be too hard to figure out how much traffic is wrongly going to the utube site. I have in fact seen several sites where similar occurances happen and the site owners work out a deal. Often with both sites adding a link to the other site so visitors that went the wrong way can find the right side.

Since utube and youtube are totally different sites it would be very easy for utube to add a link redirecting lost youtube fans and for youtube to pay the traffic/hosting costs for those links.

All happy, no need to sue anyone. Is it going to happen? Offcourse not, that would be to do no evil.

Re:READING SKILLS. GET THEM NOW!

[Dunbal]

They got their own restaurant but no toilets. So all their customers come in to use mine. Does that make me happy?

      If you were smart you'd charge $1 for each toilet use, and paying customers get unlimited free toilet tokens... now if you want to argue that the municipality obliges you to provide "free" public toilets then these are the same guys that allowed construction of a mall with no toilets?

      Excess traffic is never a "bad" thing. If anything they should explain the situation to youtube - who CAN handle the bandwidth, and see what sort of solution they come up with. I'm sure youtube could put those 65 million hits to good use and lease bandwidth to utube to run their (much lower traffic) site at a very decent rate. A cease and desist letter and/or a lawsuit does not make for good friends or business partners, however.

Re:READING SKILLS. GET THEM NOW!

[j_snare]

Now there is a sensible solution, just to talk to the other site and see what they can do.

I wanted to point out something though. Several people have brought up the idea of just changing the front page to have adwords, shrinking the images, etc. Problem, guys. Do you really think that this little company actually has someone on-staff that can make the changes? Sure, it sounds simple enough to everyone around here, but I've been noticing more and more that a lot of the time, these company's websites are set up by some contractor, then when something like this happens, all that they know how to do is move their website.

Re:READING SKILLS. GET THEM NOW!

[Mr. Slippery]

Excess traffic is never a "bad" thing.

Of course it can be. It's a slashdotting that never ends.

How much is the name worth?

[bobdotorg]

How much would a link farm pay for the name?

How much would a YouTube competitor pay to auto-redirect to their site?

Archive.org

[crontabminusell]

The last page in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for utube.com, March 8, 2005, doesn't refer to the company as utube anywhere; if they refer to themselves in a shortened form at all (from what I read) they called themselves "Universal". I hope that the courts prove that Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment is just trying to make a quick buck and the company loses out on lots of legal fees.

Mod parent down

[Prune]

World Wildlife Fund did indeed sue the World Wrestling Federation, as other posters already pointed out. If his post doesn't deserve a smackdown, no post does.

Imagine the scene

[19061969]

In a busy boardroom of a company that, well, uses industrial tubes.

MD: "Ok folks! We need to buy 3 miles of indutrial tubing to complete this job, get paid, and then we can have our bonuses for working hard!"
Lackey1: "Ok boss! I'll just go to U-Tube to buy the tubing."
MD: "Good one lackey1. You make sure we place that order by 5.00pm tonight."
Lackey1 goes off to his computer in his office.
Lackey1: "Duh, ok! Let's type in youtube.com and order them tubes."

Watches screen.

Lackey1: "Hey! There's a video of some fat guy miming to Shakira!"

Later, in boardroom at 5.00pm.

MD: "So did you order those tubes we need to make money and get bonuses?"
Lackey1: "Duh, no boss! All I could find was videos of people! They didn't sell no tubing!"
MD: "What the f___?!?!"
Lackey1: "S'true I tells yah! I typed in youtube.com and never realised that it was the wrong website. That honestly never occurred to me!"
MD: "Gahh! We're going to go bust! If only we could have found u-tube's website, we'd have been rich! Wahhhhh! I want my mommy!"

Re:Imagine the scene

[LS]

We all realize this is a joke, but the problem is not that Universal Tube buyers are getting confused and going to youtube.com instead. The problem is that utube.com's servers are being swamped.

Sorry to be a party pooper.

LS

Re:Imagine the scene

[QuantaStarFire]

You can still blame it on stupid people though. ;)

"oh its spelt youtube not utube? silly me must be all teh iming i do lol"

Whatever

[Daath]

I think google should just buy the utube.com domain from them (they're willing to sell). They gotta be willing to pay a little more than normal though :P Universal Tube is small fry too, making just about 15 million US$ per year.
Anyway, utube is a better domain than youtube ;P

Re:who was there first (whois)

[SpectralDesign]

Domain Name: UTUBE.COM

      Administrative Contact:
            Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation sales@UTUBE.COM
            27475 Holiday Lane - P.O. Box 287
            Perrysburg, OH 43552
            US
            (419) 872-2364 fax: 999 999 9999

      Technical Contact:
            Network Solutions, LLC. customerservice@networksolutions.com
            13861 Sunrise Valley Drive
            Herndon, VA 20171
            US
            1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620

      Record expires on 25-Oct-2008.
      Record created on 26-Oct-1996.

Then, we compare youtube.com:

      Record expires on 15-Feb-2009.
      Record created on 15-Feb-2005.

Looks like utube.com's been around a while longer than youtube.com, for what it's worth

They should put some Google ads on and make $$

[frinkacheese]

So they have 68 Million hits, they should put some Google ads on and make some $$. I bet they would have made more $$ from Google ads than they would have from their business anyway.

Seems that the real reason their sales are down is that they dont spot an opportunity when they see one.

Re:They should put some Google ads on and make $$

[geoffspear]

You should be running American economic policy. If only all of our heavy manufacturing industry shifted to setting up Internet ad farms, we'd be in great shape for the future.

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[Claws Of Doom]

CmdrGravy The Racist, surely.

Sue the educational establishment...

[jasquigl]

The degradation of the English language into "u r not able to spell" can hardly be blamed on YouTube/Google, can it?

what am i not getting?

[digitalsushi]

The lawsuit, filed this week in US District Court, asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com or pay Universal Tube's cost for creating a new domain. It did not specify damages.

Creating a new domain? Yikes. I hope google can caught up the 15 bucks for a new one if they lose the suit ...

Re:Icons are incorrect for story

[blasterz]

I think the point is semi-literate intarweb users looking for videos of people lighting their farts are typing utube.com into the address bar of the browser, straining the capacity of a webserver that was probably set up to only handle the traffic anticipated for a manufacturer of tubing.

Should be exempt absolutely

[Geekbot]

Trademarks are tied to the industry aren't they? So that a company named Sucky Car Parts could co-exist with a company named Sucky Cable Company because the two wouldn't be confused as they are in two different fields. Companies in different areas in different industries are going to collide online, but there is nothing they can do about it. There are limited domains. I think anyone who complains should have to put 'industry' in front of their domain so UTube can start going by plumbinguTube.com and stop whining.

Re:Should be exempt absolutely

[Pofy]

>Trademarks are tied to the industry aren't they?

Basically yes. They are also tied nationally so even in the same industry you can have two different companies in different countris with the same trademark.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[TorKlingberg]

I'd just love to type those long addresses all the time.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Anonymous Coward]

So then where does YouTube fit in such a system? Should it be youtube.videosharing.community.com? Youtube.videos.web2.com? I'm not saying it's a bad system, but I think that all the chaos on Usenet (such as the Great Renaming) would show that hierarchies set in stone run inevitably into problems when something brand new is introduced.

UTube has a problem

[Frodrick]

Utube has a legitimate problem. What they do not have is a case.

Although similar, the trademarks are for different types of business/endeavour. YouTube has made no attempt to profit from any confusion caused by the similarity in names.

In fact, the vast majority of users go to Utube when they really want YouTube. If Utube were a little bit smarter, they could use this opportunity to firmly entrench their brand name and raise public awareness of their business around the world. All it would take would be a low-bandwidth static front page that identified their business and its function (in a pleasent, humourous way) and offered a redirect link to YouTube for those who had come in error.

This is an opportunity for Utube to become obscenely wealthy - if they have enough sense to exploit it.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Colin Smith]

Do you type all of your friends phone numbers into the phone when you're calling them? No, you use directories and searches. So "all the time" is hyperbole.

Re:Icons are incorrect for story

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be sooo funny if a WWF sorry WWE game had as a secret character a big panda, which just sits on any wrestler and wins. But the developer would get sued out of existance immediately if they did that :-(

who came first not relevant

[lvcipriani]

The issue of who came first utube.com or youtube.com is not relevant. This issue is why should youtube.com be responsible for typos entered by other parties. It's not like youtube.com suggested anyone go to utube.com and visit that website. It would be one thing for youtube.com to put a link on their web site saying "Click here and bring utube.com to it's knees!" but that's not what's going on at all.

Re:who came first not relevant

[Dunbal]

This issue is why should youtube.com be responsible for typos entered by other parties.

      I have a business here in this central american country. I do ok, but I think I could make a hell of a lot more money if there were more North Americans and Europeans here - most of the locals just can't afford me. I think I will sue the airlines for not flying enough foreigners to this country.

sues? for what ?

[l0cust]

uZing k0rrekT sPelling ??????????????????????

Darwin awards

[benhocking]

An industrial strength lathe or shear welder isn't the kind of thing you buy on a whim while looking for videos on the internet.

Well, perhaps if you're tring to make one of those lame videos where someone injures himself to post on YouTube...

Abolish TLDs

[wizrd_nml]

What Utube is trying to do is, in my opinion, rubbish. But it brings to mind something regarding TLDs that I always thought was strange. TLDs, by definition, are worthless. All we need is .com. Whenever a new TLD is introduced, people who already own the .com or .org domain rush to purchase the equivalent one under the new TLD. It's just a way to make more money for domain registrars. It doesn't effectively increase the namespace.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Colin Smith]

Who said anything about set in stone? youtube.webservices.com and utube.equipment.com.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[silas_moeckel]

Yes I do, entering 7 digits from memory is faster than popping up contacts typing in the first few letters, selecting the right phone (mobile or home or work etc) I can dial numbers of a phone without looking or much thought, my contact list is solely in the phone for caller ID and voice dialing while driving with a headset.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Colin Smith]

I don't know if you'd noticed but there are already national DNS zones.

e.g. .fr .dk .es .fi .at .pt .se .be .gr .ie .nl .it .de

Why didn't utube buy youtube?

[HxBro]

If I was registering utube.com I'd have also registered youtube.com at the same time, they sound similar, if you're going to say youtube.com or utube.com to someone they are not going to know the difference.

Cheap Stunt

[NokX]

their quite possibly just looking for some free publicity/advertisement by bringing this "case" forward. it's a baseless lawsuit because it's not youtube's fault if utube doesn't explain to it's customers on how to type in their website address.

there are all kinds of websites out there that need some sort of explanation (includes a hyphen, uses 2 instead of two, etc...) and utube.com is another one of those sites that need explaining when being told to the customer. they named their company that back in the 80's - they're stuck with it.

frivolous lawsuits like this should be discouraged by huge fines and the suspension/removal of the law practicing license of the lawyers who take-on/instigate such lawsuits.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 10 digits for most people in NA now... And it's a pain in the ass when I'm on a regular phone/cell phone.

Of course, those of us running software like Asterisk (properly configured) never even noticed that they had to add the 3 digits.

Um...

[ari_j]

No, Data flies a starship. His evil brother Lore takes the bus.

Google's deep pockets?

[bl00d6789]

So now Utube is suing YouTube seeking a cease and desist on the youtube domain (I wonder if they think Google's pockets might be deeper that the previous owners)

If all they're seeking is a cease and desist order, then Google's big pockets are not a perk. It's the exact opposite. If they're just seeking injunctive relief and not damages, then Google's deep pockets just mean a harder, longer and much more expensive fight.

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[CmdrGravy]

Are all Welsh people pure blood descendents of Jones The First or are they in fact a society of people racially very similar to the other inhabitants of the British Isles ?

I'm suing IBM

[ajw1976]

My company, EyeBM, has lost so much work because of them...

Re:I'm suing IBM

[Elminst]

Lies! ;)

Domain Name: EYEBM.COM
Registrar: REGISTER.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.register.com
Referral URL: http://www.register.com/
Name Server: NS.WATSON.IBM.COM
Name Server: INTERNET-SERVER.ZURICH.IBM.COM
Name Server: NS.ERS.IBM.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Status: REGISTRAR-HOLD
EPP Status: clientDeleteProhibited
EPP Status: clientUpdateProhibited
EPP Status: clientHold
EPP Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 27-Nov-2005
Creation Date: 27-Nov-1996
Expiration Date: 26-Nov-2006

Re:I'm suing IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh.... it was a joke

Soundspace (not namespace) problem

[CurbyKirby]

If a trademarked sound (not even a specific spelling) can be enforced throughout all industries, the good names really will be all taken soon. This lawsuit would make more sense if

(1) youtube (2005) had launched after utube.com (2006),
(2) the company behind utube was actually named "You Tube", or
(3) youtube was into manufacturing, and not entertainment.

Re:Soundspace (not namespace) problem

[Mr. Slippery]

If a trademarked sound

Trademark is not the issue.

youtube (2005) had launched after utube.com (2006)

The news page of a website is not a guide to the domain's age, whois is. utube.com (26-Oct-1996) is far older then youtube.com (15-Feb-2005).

/. quality continues it's downfall....RTFA.

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

UTube was there ten years before youtube.com

Also stop saying "tinfoil hat". For a bunch of geeks who pride themselves on being "accurate", aluminum foil and tin foil are distinctly different things.

Jesus /. gets dumber everyday.

OK bitches mod me down now I got tons o' karma.

Re:/. quality continues it's downfall....RTFA.

[geoffspear]

Also stop saying "tinfoil hat". For a bunch of geeks who pride themselves on being "accurate", aluminum foil and tin foil are distinctly different things.

Yes, and we also know that aluminum doesn't stop the mindcontrol rays like tin does, asshat*.

* Sorry for the inaccuracy. I know that "rectum hat" would be more accurate, but it takes longer to type.

Re:/. quality continues it's downfall....RTFA.

[geekoid]

"Also stop saying "tinfoil hat". For a bunch of geeks who pride themselves on being "accurate", aluminum foil and tin foil are distinctly different things. "

and? you have a point? We know they are different things, if we say tinfoil hat, and you think of aluminum foil, you are the idiot.

And /. does not get dunmber it's always been this way.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Bovarchist]

That's great from an organizational standpoint, but most people have trouble remembering even the simple URLs we have now. Moving to this system would force people to use a search engine to find everything, and since the search engine URL would be too long to remember, they would just stick to MSN or live.com or whatever happens to be on their system when they buy it. I know a lot of people do that already, but this system would make it worse. Never underestimate the power of stupidity to undermine even the most brilliant plans.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[smallpaul]

Ummmm. Who is going to maintain this ontology? And what happens when companies span industries? And what about when they shift industries? Your system is more complicated, more expensive and causes more typing. What's not to love? Let's shift the complexity from the well-established legal/trademark system to every single user of the Internet!

GooTube? YouTube?

[colonslashslash]

Nein. Enter: SueTube.

What about ACME?

[gr8dude]

Besides the issues pointed out by others, there is another one - what if my company offers more than one type of product? I would be forced to register a zillion domains.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Bloke down the pub]

microsoft.vendors.software.com
apple.vendors.software.com
opensource.vendors.software.com

I like usenet too.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Moderatbastard]

FFS, don't mod people up just because they have 4 digit IDs.

Trademarks must be protected

[Reservoir Penguin]

Clearly the registration authorities must first check for trademark violations before registering the domain. In the information space domain name is not just a virtual analog of a physical address but for all intents and purposes an identity.

Re:Trademarks must be protected

[Elminst]

Yeah! Like the Patent office checks for prior art!
Oh wait...

don't forget bodacious tatas

[elecuanime]

One of the more scurrilous episodes in internet domain conflict was the bodacious tatas - tata pencil company (of India!) WIPO decision. http://www.bodacious-tatas.org/

perhaps..

[Zaharazod]

..with all those tubes, they can build their own Internets! With blackjack, and hookers.. in fact, forget the YouTube and the blackjack.

I can forsee the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

UTube goes out of business, and drops the suit against YouTube. ... no one cares.

If they were smart..

[sergeantmudd]

If utube was smart, they would just get a new domain name for their tiny company and auction off utube.com to the highest bidder. Problem solved, money made.

free advertising?

[disasm]

This has got to be the first time I've ever heard of someone sueing someone over free advertising for a website. Sam

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[finkployd]

I understand the most recent versions of browsers have this new "bookmarking" features.

In a few years, there may even be a way to "search" the web.

So yes I'm being unnecessarily snarky (shut up firefox spellchecker, it IS a real word), but my point is that the minor inconvenience people may have typing a few extra keys (the horror) would be far outweighed by having a logical naming system that is not begging for abuse like the current one does.

Finkployd

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[maxume]

images.google.search.internet.service.provider.com mercial? What's long about that?

Re:Next in line: Cisco. What about slashdot?

[kibbylow]

Universal Tubes actually should be suing Cisco for claiming that their routers power the Internet. Everyone knows Internet is a "Series of Tubes" and UTube manufactures the tubes.

What about suing slashdot? I'm sure being slashdotted causes many users to be unable to access their site.

Simple legal solution to this problem

[kaltkalt]

Here is a very simple solution to the problem. Make domain names presumably exempt from all trademark laws UNLESS the plaintiff can show, with clear and convincing evidence (a higher burden of proof than the usual preponderance of the evidence standard), that the owner of the domain name registered the domain in question: (1) with the intent, at the time of the registration, to cause confusion between two products, services, entities, or existing trademarks; and (2) the use of the domain is NOT to exercise free speech in a noncommercial way (e.g. walmartsucks.com is protected). This protects everyone's interest, is a very clear, bright-line standard, and won't result in business owners with legitimate arguments as to why they should have a domain name fighting with someone else who legitimately, without bad intent, registered it first (like this case). Very simple.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[ModDoc]

I think they already have what you're describing. Isn't it called USENET?

Sorry, have to go, I need to call 1-800-TELEPHONESERVICE-MOBILE-VENDORS-TMOBILE about my bill.

Someone tell them of adWords!

[Ruvim]

Would someone tell those morons at utube.com about online ads! TFA says that their annual volume is about $15mil, I bet that if they put just put some google ads there, they might as well double their profit without selling any pipe at all!

What really brought on the suit.

[cwinfough]

If anyone that is in the market for something that utube.com makes they are going to know to go to utube.com and not youtube.com. utube.com has such a niche market that they obviously could not be mistaken for the latter. Meanwhile back at utube.... Hey Bob have you seen our 3rd quarter earnings. Yeah! the earnings are in the crapper looks like were not going to get that raise or be able to take that Bahama's cruise on the company's dime. Oh hey i got an idea....

Re:What really brought on the suit.

[tepples]

I hope that was a joke. The real issue is that youtube slashdotted utube.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[threeturn]

Let me guess, you sort your socks before putting them away - right?

Slashdotted sites will sue /.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Well, how long do you think it will be fore UTube sues slashdot for slashdotting its site even more than they were by clueless n00bs trying to find raunchy videos? Well, /. does not have the billions that Google has. But if /. ever grows that big, it too will be sued I think.

Re:Slashdotted sites will sue /.

[geoffspear]

They're probably not going to be successful in suing youtube, but I can guarantee they wouldn't be successful in suing a site that's reporting legitimate news about their site. There's a big difference here.

Incompetence or ignorance?

[asbjornu]

It's no wonder that U Tube looses customers. A Google search for "U Tube" or search for "utube"doesn't yield Universal Tube's homepage as any of the first 100 results. Why is this? Well, here's one reason. Another one is that the web page uses completely non-semantic markup without a single H1 element in the source code. Non-semantic code is basically just jibberish for search engines, so they could just as well have riddled their pages with googlygook. The search results would be the same.

Yet another reason is that "utube" or "u tube" is mentioned nowhere on their pages. The design is built with endless amounts of nested tables. The markup-to-content ratio is sky-high. And they're using JavaScript as the main means for navigation. It almost looks like they're actively blocking users and search engines from making any sence of their web pages. A redesign with a solid implementation of semantic and accessible markup, would increase the searchability and usability of their pages by an order of magnitude and they would both get happier customers and less reason to go to court.

But it's of course much easier to just sue YouTube for their own incompetence. Or ignorance. Or both.

Re:Incompetence or ignorance?

[Mr. Slippery]

A Google search for "U Tube" or search for "utube"doesn't yield Universal Tube's homepage as any of the first 100 results.

What are you talking about? utube.com is the very first result on a Google search for "utube", and the second for "u tube".

And Google is smart enough to understand code that doesn't pass w3c validation - which is good, because only a vanishingly small percent of sites pass.

Re:Incompetence or ignorance?

[asbjornu]

What are you talking about? utube.com is the very first result on a Google search for "utube", and the second for "u tube".

"u tube" does not list the domain utube.com in the first 100 search results. Neither does u tube. I wrongly suggested that utube didn't either, and for that I am sorry.

And Google is smart enough to understand code that doesn't pass w3c validation - which is good, because only a vanishingly small percent of sites pass.

Just because Google vaguely understands egregiously broken HTML doesn't mean it's a good practice producing it. It's a fact that Google and any other search engine weights pages with less markup and more content higher than pages with more markup and less content. They also weigh pages with semantic markup (which uses <h1>...</h1> for headings instead of <font size="4"><b>...</b></font>, <p> for paragraphs instead of <br><br>, <ul> and <li> for lists instead of <br>-separated lines with <img src="bullet.gif">, etc) higher than pages with complete rubbish tagsoup markup like the one utube.com employs. They also fancy regular HTTP URI's better than JavaScript function calls as links. A unique title on each page wouldn't hurt either. I could go on and on, but I shouldn't have to; this is so obvious that it should be screaming holes in your eyes just by looking at the source code.

Re:Incompetence or ignorance?

[multipartmixed]

The have been online since 1996, and still haven't figured out H1 tags.

I think we can safely punch the "incompetent" chad.

Re:Incompetence or ignorance?

[Mr. Slippery]

"u tube" does not list the domain utube.com in the first 100 search results. Neither does u tube. I wrongly suggested that utube didn't either, and for that I am sorry.

With a quoted phrase '"u tube"', you are correct. With the much more likely unquoted two-word search phrase 'u tube', Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation's utube.com is the second result, behind youtube.com.

Just because Google vaguely understands egregiously broken HTML doesn't mean it's a good practice producing it.

Didn't suggest that it was. Only that your statement that "Non-semantic code is basically just jibberish for search engines" is about an order of magnitude too strong.

Re:Incompetence or ignorance?

[asbjornu]

With a quoted phrase '"u tube"', you are correct. With the much more likely unquoted two-word search phrase 'u tube', Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation's utube.com is the second result, behind youtube.com.

Yes, you are right. I'm just too used to searching with quotes, I guess, that I dind't think about not doing it. That doesn't change the fact that their markup is horrendous, though my original point about that being the reason for their absence from Google's index is now proven to be partly incorrect. My research could have been better, I admit.

Didn't suggest that it was. Only that your statement that "Non-semantic code is basically just jibberish for search engines" is about an order of magnitude too strong.

Well, it doesn't make any more sense to a search engine than a PDF document or Flash file without any accessibility voodoo applied to it. It's basically just a huge blob of text, where no parts of the text are weighed or indexed any differently than the other. And that's not very search engine — nor user — friendly.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Dunbal]

Wait wait you forgot:

5alc934mz85f7sdj40b.emailreplies.spammers.com

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Several small, soot covered, web site admins filed suit against Slashdot and OSDN today. Saying "if UTube can sue YouTube for excess traffic, then we want ours".

Not a trademark case... not a case.

[spiritraveller]

Should domain name simply be exempt from trademark legislation in all countries or is it a legit thing to fight for?

No, domain names should not be exempt from trademark claims. They should be treated the same as any other way of presenting oneself.

Regardless, this is not a trademark case. "Utube" is not in the same business as "Youtube", and "Youtube" is not benefitting from "Utube's" name in any way. Under any common definition, it isn't trademark infringement.

And while I can sympathize with these people that did nothing wrong, and had a successful company that suddenly got screwed over merely because of Youtube's success... I can't really see anything that Youtube has done wrong either.

There's no cause of action (i.e. no legally cognizable claim for suit) that I can see. Their best bet is to cause a PR problem for Google, in hopes that Google will give them free hosting.

Would you ever be on utube's side?

[Guppy06]

"(I wonder if they think Google's pockets might be deeper that the previous owners'.)"

Or maybe, just maybe, they didn't want to go running to the lawyers first thing to see if something amicable could be worked out? Of couse, if they did go reaching for the lawyers as soon as "youtube.com" was registered, they'd likely be decried around here as the next SCO.

But we like youtube, so any enemies of it must be ebil.

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[Dunbal]

a society of people racially very similar to the other inhabitants of the British Isles ?

      Except for their unique ability to be able to read and even pronounce a language that consists mostly of the letters C, L and Y...

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[soft_guy]

Welsh is a race?

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[riffzifnab]

"And of course we now have phishing problems as well. Oh happy days."

And your suggestion would make it a whole lot worse. People have a hard enough time remembering their bank's URL and you want to make it longer? Lets see is my bank's URL http://citi-bank.bank.us.com or is it http://citibank.us.banks.com. Solution: buy more domains. Be quiet or the registers might actually implement your idea. We already have .ws, .tv, and .mobi and thats bad enough.

I have a beter idea, lets use Dewey Decimal Classification! And tubes, steam powered pneumatics tubes to shoot information right to you, it will be so convenient and organized! Quick son, punch up http://229.1039 I want to read my slashdot!

Trademarking domain names

[VincenzoRomano]

A domain name and related services like email and web pages should be treated like phone numbers: it's a communication address.
A domain name is not the company itself ot its products and services!
If none would sue anyone for having chosen a specific phone number (like 800 numbers), why on earth a domain name should be the object of legal actions?

They should have been using UniversalTube.com

[sherriw]

I don't see how UTube has a leg to stand on. First of all their name is Universal Tube so they only have tradmark claim on UniversalTube.com- which they should change their marketing material to use that domain- to prevent confusion. Second, the letter U and the word You are not anywhere close to eachother except for sound. It's not like the case of McDonald's and MacDonald's. You Tube did nothing wrong and did not register a domain that looks or reads similar- just sounds similar.

UTube needs to re-think their marketing material or come up with a more appropriate domain. Or, if their bandwidth is being slammed- host the main page elsewhere with a splash page sending all the YouTube kiddies to the correct site, and the UTube customers to their actual Universal Tube company site. I wish people would stop sueing others because they were hit by some bad luck. Litigation is for stopping illegal or malicious actions, not coincidence.

Re:They should have been using UniversalTube.com

[myz24]

If only I had mod points....

It's an unfortunately coincidence that the names collide and nothing else. It's not like YouTube picked that name out of spite for a company that screwed them on some tubing.

Re:They should have been using UniversalTube.com

[rjstanford]

The appropriate legal issue here is probably "maintaining an attractive nuisance." Or whatever your local (federal?) version is. Doing something that, while legal in and of itself, causes someone else great distress or difficulty - its a bit of a catch-all, but is remarkably unabused in most situations.

Re:They should have been using UniversalTube.com

[sherriw]

Ah, but how to prove that YouTube knew of the existance of UTube before they started up their dot-com? They didn't necessarily check for UTube.com first and then register YouTube.com as a second choice. Maybe they never even thought of seeing if there's a UTube. And even if they did- so what? So now every business has to check for other domains that SOUND similar too? Bah!

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[HaloZero]

That, and the fact that if you rely on the contact list / address book, you're up shit creek without a paddle if/when you lose/damage/destroy/need your phone.

Here's the link to Utube

[objekt]

http://utube.com/

Re:Here's the link to Utube

[klang]

funny, very very funny :-)

Re:Here's the link to Utube

[loraksus]

Service Unavailable

Shame, I was going to get their contact information and give them a friendly phone call :(

Re:Here's the link to Utube

[objekt]

[urkel]"Did I do that?"[/urkel]

utube, welcome to adwords/adsense

[vancbc]

So put up some google ads that points to youtube. Profit from peoples mistakes.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[eserteric]

Wasn't the entire point of the domain name system to avoid addresses that are difficult to remember? How am I going to remember that IBM is under vendors.software when their name is "International Business Machines", not "International Business Software"? And I find it funny that you've included Amazon in your example when Amazon is one of the worst possible examples you could have, largely due to the fact that Amazon sells everything under the sun nowadays. You'd have:

amazon.vendors.books.com
amazon.vendors.music.com
amazon.vendors.appliances.com
amazon.vendors.clothing.com
amazon.vendors.videogames.com
amazon.vendors.segways.com ...

All for the same site. Also there are so many niche industries out there it would be impossible to classify them all within one or two levels. What's eBay? ebay.services.auctions.com? What about the people who just have stores there? storename.ebay.vendors.*.com? What do you put in that wild card: sportsmemorbilia, clothing, antiquelocks, glasstrinkets....

If we had used your system from the beginning right now we'd all be saying "hey, anyone remember that internet thing? Man, that had promise."

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Gr8Apes]

You've either got a great memory for all those 10 digit numbers you have to remember, or you don't have many numbers to remember.

I find it much easier to type in the first char or two of the name, and voila, there's the number within another click or two. (Cell phone with 100s of programmed numbers).

There's no way I'm going to recall person x's cell number that I called once 2 years ago. I can remember their name, though.

This is nuts...

[Jennifer York]

If you search for "Used Tubes" Universal Tubes is on the first page. There is little chance that someone seeking tubes is going to be confused by the existence of new cultural phenomenon like YouTube.

Re:This is nuts...

[Tim C]

The problem (as I understand it) is all the people trying to go to youtube, typing it in as utube, and hammering utube's servers into the ground. Bandwidth is cheap, but not free; get enough hits and it can start to become pretty expensive, not to mention the potential loss of revenue as the site is too slow to respond to genuine customers.

The problem is not people wanting to go to utube, but typing in youtube and being confused.

Disambiguation pages

[Mark Programmer]

It occurs to me that Wikipedia already has a great solution for this sort of problem: disambiguation pages. You can see a similar solution employed by the Firefox browser team and the Firefox e-mentoring company if you go to firefox.com.

I think it would be great if these disambiguation pages could be made manditory; that is to say, in the event of a concept collision between two companies, the best ruling one or the other company could hope for would be a court mandate that a disambiguation page be hosted by whichever company is larger. Not really tenable in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure, but those pages are probably the best practical solution.

Of course, the lawsuit is probably less about practicality and more about the opportunity to wrestle large chunks of cash out of Google. *sigh*

Re:Disambiguation pages

[ToreTS]

What about E-mail? SSH? A HTML disambiguation page won't work for those cases. The Internet != The WWW!

Re:Disambiguation pages

[Mark Programmer]

This is very true. However, this point is a non-issue, and I think it would be a non-issue in the majority of cases.

The issue at stake in the case was that traffic from anonymous users (specifically, HTTP requests) was flooding UTube's site and killing it. In contrast, e-mail, ssh, and most other internet services are authenticated services, which means one can make the assumption that the user is going to a known site, not "browsing" to a site they've never seen before.

It's not ssh traffic that's killing sites with clashing DNS names, it's HTTP traffic. And the internet isn't the WWW, but the WWW is the most popular anonymous-request application on the internet. A special-case solution might be called for, given the ridiculous skew in popularity of the application.

trademark registered for purpose of lawsuit

[sribe]

As was pointed out on groklaw well before this made it here, the utube trademark application was not filed until after the problem started, so they're not going to get anywhere in court on trademark claims. As for the other, yes there's a lot of half-wits out there who can't get a URL straight, so upgrade the server & connection and deal with it! 70k hits per day should not be the end of the world!

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[lnx_daemon]

This is effectively like addming more top-level domains, though not as easy to use as a TLD. And that won't really make any difference because companies will buy up all the domains they can to protect their name. So in the end, the only ones that benefit from that are the registrars. It still wouldn't matter as long as there is no one actually policing who owns domains.

In hindsight...

[Ctawp]

Maybe we should have registered youtube.com back in 1996 when we registered utube.com. Not that anybody would ever confuse the two.

W3C validated HTML for PageRank?

[Lazy Jones]

Why is this? Well, here's one reason.

Can you give me an authoritative source with information about Google's using W3C's HTML validation in the PageRank calculation?

Re:W3C validated HTML for PageRank?

[tepples]

True, Google more than likely does not use validator software provided by W3C on each HTML page that it spiders. However, some of the same errors that W3C catches trip up Google. For instance, Utube's images do not have alt= attributes, but Google can't make head nor tail of an image without alt=something useful.

Re:W3C validated HTML for PageRank?

[asbjornu]

Can you give me an authoritative source with information about Google's using W3C's HTML validation in the PageRank calculation?

No, I can't, because they don't. But valid pages are more often than not also semantic and structured, so it's just one side of the same issue. If you read my whole comment, you would have seen that the invalidity of U Tube's HTML is not the only cause for their (as good as) complete absence from Google's index. Searching for pages indexed on the utube.com domain yields exactly one search result, namely the front page. None of the sub-pages are indexed at all. That's proof enough that the quality of their markup is so poor that Google doesn't understand much of it at all.

Re:W3C validated HTML for PageRank?

[Lazy Jones]

But valid pages are more often than not also semantic and structured, so it's just one side of the same issue. If you read my whole comment, you would have seen that the invalidity of U Tube's HTML is not the only cause for their (as good as) complete absence from Google's index.

I have read your whole comment and I still don't understand how you consider "invalidity of HTML is one of the reasons for utube's absence from Google's index" a valid statement. It has nothing to do with the fact that it doesn't validate, the fact that it doesn't is only a hint that there *might* be some other flaws that prevent Google from indexing it or ranking it better (no proof shown yet). I do not like such attempts to give W3C HTML validation more importance than it deserves.

Also, the Google index has 2380 pages from utube.com, they are apparently only considered identical (or not worth showing in detail) because they all have the same title/description.

Re:W3C validated HTML for PageRank?

[asbjornu]

I still don't understand how you consider "invalidity of HTML is one of the reasons for utube's absence from Google's index" a valid statement. It has nothing to do with the fact that it doesn't validate, the fact that it doesn't is only a hint that there *might* be some other flaws that prevent Google from indexing it or ranking it better (no proof shown yet). I do not like such attempts to give W3C HTML validation more importance than it deserves.

Besides being a troll or as incompetent as the developers behind utube.com, what other good reason do you have for supporting its extremely poor coding and non-existing search engine optimalization? Do you have economic interests in the company? Did you develop the code? If not, what?

The fact is that the HTML code (and anyone with any experience and competence in this field will tell you the same, including any Google employee) is so bad that Google can't tell the difference between 2380 pages, although all of those pages (in theory) are unique. There are so many problems with the markup besides it not being valid, that I can't bring myself to understand why you want to debate it. The markup is of 1997-quality and you know it. At least if you know semantic HTML from tagsoup. If you don't, I see no point in continuing this discussion.

Let's view this from another point: Explain to me how the markup can be of excellent and for some reason, utube.com still doesn't manage to get within the first 100 (or even 500) first search results on Google. Is it conspiracy? If not, what?

Re:W3C validated HTML for PageRank?

[Lazy Jones]

I will ignore your silly flames, perhaps you can come up with some sensible points too.

The fact is that the HTML code (and anyone with any experience and competence in this field will tell you the same, including any Google employee) is so bad that Google can't tell the difference between 2380 pages,

This seems to be simply a matter of using the same title / meta tags. It has nothing to do with validation or poor HTML (in the technical sense).

Let's view this from another point: Explain to me how the markup can be of excellent and for some reason, utube.com still doesn't manage to get within the first 100 (or even 500) first search results on Google. Is it conspiracy? If not, what?

I would attribute this to a PEBKAC problem on your side. For me, a search for "utube" returns utube.com as the first hit, when I search for "u tube" and "used tubes" it comes up on the first page. Honestly, I have no idea what your issue is, but you seem to have no grounds for arguing there, much less to flame me in such an immature way.

How to avoid this kind of "oops"

[davecb]

Back when new root domains were first proposed, one of the best proposals to deal with the trade-name-clash problem was to use the business type, taken from a common list maintained by the WTO.

That would have make then utube.manuf, which would tend to reduce the likelyhood of error.

--dave

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[lawpoop]

"Hence stuff like .bank, .retail, .energy, .telecom etc etc."

Do you have to prove that you are a bank in order to get a .bank domain name? Will GoDaddy et al do their due diligence and make sure, or would they rather make a sale?

It seems to me that this would give another false sense of authenticity to a victim of a phishing attack. "Look, the site ends in .bank ( or even .bank.com ) It must be a bank!"

Seriously...

[bberens]

put up a couple of ads and laugh your way to the bank. Forget tubes, welcome to the advertising world.

mod up plz

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed

Nothing to do with marketing.

[R2.0]

"Utube.com" represents "Universal Tube", which is short for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation.

Why didn't they just use "Universaltube.com" you ask? Because that URL is held by Universal Tube Inc. a tubing assembly manufacturer and supplier.

Sooo, when will Universal Tube Inc. sue Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation for the added traffic from all the people typing in "UniversalTube.com" and expecting to get the equipment manufacturer?

Re:Nothing to do with marketing.

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed my point. I don't have a problem with Universal Tube using "utube.com". I have a problem with people hearing "You Tube" and assuming it was spelt "U Tube".

Re:Nothing to do with marketing.

[dotgain]

Yeah, because it's pretty obvious, even if you've never seen the domain name before.

protip: Say both "youtube" and "utube" out loud. Report your findings.

Whois Information

[cybermage]

I find it interesting that Utube.com has been around for a lot longer than YOUtube.com:

Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation
  27475 Holiday Lane - P.O. Box 287
  Perrysburg, OH 43552
  US
 
  Domain Name: UTUBE.COM
 
  Administrative Contact:
      Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation sales@UTUBE.COM
      27475 Holiday Lane - P.O. Box 287
      Perrysburg, OH 43552
      US
      (419) 872-2364 fax: 999 999 9999
 
  Technical Contact:
      Network Solutions, LLC. customerservice@networksolutions.com
      13861 Sunrise Valley Drive
      Herndon, VA 20171
      US
      1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620
 
  Record expires on 25-Oct-2008.
  Record created on 26-Oct-1996.
  Database last updated on 2-Nov-2006 09:15:20 EST.
 
  Domain servers in listed order:
 
  NS65.WORLDNIC.COM 205.178.190.33
  NS66.WORLDNIC.COM 205.178.189.33
 
YouTube, Inc.
  ATTN: YOUTUBE.COM
  c/o Network Solutions
  P.O. Box 447
  Herndon, VA 20172-0447
 
  Domain Name: YOUTUBE.COM
 
  Administrative Contact :
        YouTube, Inc. qq78m9kc23q@networksolutionsprivateregistration.c om
        ATTN: YOUTUBE.COM
      c/o Network Solutions
      P.O. Box 447
      Herndon, VA 20172-0447
      Phone: 570-708-8780
 
  Technical Contact :
      YouTube, Inc.
      qq78m9kc23q@networksolutionsprivateregistration.c om
      ATTN: YOUTUBE.COM
      c/o Network Solutions
      P.O. Box 447
      Herndon, VA 20172-0447
      Phone: 570-708-8780
 
  Record expires on 15-Feb-2009
  Record created on 15-Feb-2005
  Database last updated on 15-Oct-2006
 
  Domain servers in listed order: Manage DNS
 
  DNS1.SJL.YOUTUBE.COM 208.65.152.201
  DNS2.SJL.YOUTUBE.COM 208.65.152.137

YOUtube is nearly a decade after Utube. I could see them having some confusion as their names are pronounced the same.

--
Real News without sensationalized crime and celebrity gossip

So uh, what's the problem?

[itsallgeek2me]

Am I missing something? If I owned this company and saw that amount of traffic going to my servers I'd be thinking this:

1) Add advertising for whoever will pay for it to the front page
2) ??? - Oh wait, we know this step!
3) Profit!!!!

I suspect they'd be making a whole lot more money than they do selling tubes. (though I suppose if they really want to keep doing that they could)

If the domain name is such a burden I'd be more than happy to take it off their hands. On second thought... uh.. yeah, forget that, it's a bad idea *contacting utube to see how much they'd sell their domain for. The $$$ is MINE, I thought of it first, hands off!* Um, just forget I said anything..

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Res3000]

In fact .ws is the top level domain of Samoa, and .tv of Tuvalu. They just market them the wrong way (or the right way if you want).

Monitize (Google/Yahoo) the utibe site.

[Anonymous Coward]

and they should easily be able to bring in $500,000 plus a month. -- 68,000,000 visitors/month times 1% ad click rate = 680,000 ads clicked times times $1 per ad average = $680,000 per month. Kind of a no-brainer......

But they refuse to run ads on their site and their company only makes $12 million in annual gross sales. How stupid and pathetic.

They are in the envious position of being able to capitalize and make a ton of money just by having the right name. Yet they choose to sue Google. Duh.

http://www.fbsolawyer.com/

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[dwayneabailey]

I'm not a racist. And quit calling me Shirley.

Nothing but greed

[jbarr]

"I wonder if they think Google's pockets might be deeper that the previous owners'."

What an amazing coincidence that U-Tube chose to litigate AFTER Google, a company with VERY deep pockets) bought out YouTube. Sounds like nothing more than a case of pure greed...

Re:Nothing but greed

[klang]

Who can blame UTube? .. YouTube was bought for more than they make in 10 years!

(Their current Alexa ranking, 13361 is the envy of every tube manufacturer in the world, I am sure.)

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[WML MUNSON]

Unfortunately, using your system, things get a little hairy right around list item number one, and then things go downhill pretty quickly after that.

A lot of companies are in more than one market -- hardware, software, etc -- therefore sticking someone like IBM into a vendor.software or whatever domain would probably REALLY piss them off because they also manufacture tons of hardware related items and offer various other services.

You can't organize like that because so many people/businesses do so many things.

Legitimate Parody

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a parody. Bloody obvious to anyone that it is too. Even judges. It's all good. And fairly amusing.

No issue here

[insomniac8400]

uTube isn't the name of the company, it's a short hand version of their name universal tube & blah blah. It's completely crap for them to claim they have the rights to youTube, when youTube is the name of the site and company, not just the domain name.

Re:No issue here

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK, because they're not claiming any such thing. How about you RTFA, if you can?

Prognosis . . .

[Dausha]

My prognosis is they will lose. This is a trademark issue, and the two are not in a related marketing niche. That is, unless selling tubbing is the same as watching videos. I've been researching a similar trademark issue, and have seen cases where courts have not seen a similar marketing niche between two online purveyors of music. The plaintiff was a Christian music seller, and the other was not.

Very unlikely they'll succeed, especially with Google at the helm.

Of course, the worst thing to do with a C&D is comply immediately as that can become evidence of infringement. I'm sure Google will look for a lawyer.

Also, this is likely in response to the new deep pockets of Google . . .

Re:Winning? Who said anything about winning?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to win.

As long as they offer to "settle" for less than the cost of a legal battle, they can probably get enough money to efficiently change their name. Considering they have not case, this is ridiculous. It is also the current state of the legal system. Litigation is costly. Even Google doesn't overspend on litigation just to prove a point.

Sad, but true.

In an ideal world, an indexing service should be independent of trademark law. A domain name is just an index to a network address; how this corresponds to laws designed to protect a physical tradesman's mark on a specific, limited set of products I'll never know.

Is your trademark in the category "domain names?". No? It's for pipe? And they're not selling pipes labeled with your name? Then go home.

Problem solved.

I hope

[NRISecretAgent]

Ohhh dear god I hope that it's because the domains names are actually similar and not because YouTube is higher ranked on Google...

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[cmdr_tofu]

that is a really good idea!

Perhaps a farsighted individual can start implementing the alternate mapping scheme ADNS
and registering people in the one ADNS root server in the world :)

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Crayon Kid]

Right, hierarchical organization. Worked really well for Gopher... until it got extinct, that is.

Utube isn't going to get anywhere with this claim

[Infonaut]

the utube trademark application was not filed until after the problem started

As sribe points out, Utube isn't in a good position on this one. If it looks, smells, and tastes like hogwash, it probably is. These guys don't have a leg to stand on. Likelihood of confusion between YouTube (videos online) and Utube (tubing) is infinitesimally small. Actual damage done by YouTube to Utube is going to be very difficult to prove.

Domain name sound-alikes do not a successful trademark case make. The fact that they didn't even register the trademark until now is not going to fly with the court.

One small problem

[Midnight Thunder]

One advantage with the current non-country TLDs is that they are short and for the most part pass as internationally accepted. The problem with adding TLDs like .telecom is that they are very definetly English centric. This sort of issue would be enough to give more reason to people who want to break the ASCII-limited domains names - there are groups who want domain names to support different 'alphabets' such as Kanji, Arabic, Sanscrit, etc.

The other problem is abuse of the system. There are plenty of companies out there who buy up all there alternative TLDs that could have their domain in, for example myco.com, myco.info, myco.name, etc.

The final issue is not matter what you do there will always be someone wanting an excuse to sue.

can we whine any more???

[sirjoebob]

come on.... this is just stupid litigation. there s a whitehouse.com which happens to be a porn site and the federal government doesnt piss and moan that they lose hits on their webpage. i mean, tell people "u", not "you".... no big deal.... freaking utube is just trying to make a quick buck--- or here is a thought, they are using youtube to generate publicity based on this fictitous controversy..... nothing more, nothing less....... according to Ted Stevens, the internet is just a series of tubes anyways... here, href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lYiDo0DjSk see for yourself:)

Apple Computer vs. phone sex

[tepples]

If none would sue anyone for having chosen a specific phone number (like 800 numbers), why on earth a domain name should be the object of legal actions?

For a long time, 1-800-SOS-APPLe (1-800-767-2775) was Apple Computer's tech support number in the United States, while 1-800-S0S-APPLe (1-800-707-2775) was an alternate number for the phone sex service whose ordinary number was 1-800-PUSSIES (1-800-787-7437).

Re:Apple Computer vs. phone sex

[VincenzoRomano]

I would check a phone directory before calling a supposed good number.
Have you ever tried goggle.com?

Interview with UTube owner and CEO

[indian_rediff]

The following interview with Ralph Girkins, the owner of Universal Tubes, was broadcast on Marketplace - a segment in National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/. A transcript is available at http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/10/1 3/PM200610134.html. Makes for interesting readin and definitely changes many of the assumptions that people are making regarding the kind of business he is trying to run. And you can definitely glean his frustration from his comments, at the lack of cooperation from Google/Youtube. So, why not go the American way? Sue sue sue!

Re:Winning? Who said anything about winning?

[pete6677]

They don't have to settle, and certainly have no reason to change their name. This tire maker or whatever is just looking for some publicity. The real YouTube can just stall the lawsuit by filing endless motions and continuances, until the tire maker finally gives up. Standard legal procedures for a big company. This really isn't an unusual case at all.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[kthejoker]

While on one hand I agree with you, the article here explains the problem with your point of view. So many domain-level URLs are either:

a) Nonsensical. "Google." "Yahoo." "eBay."
b) Ambigious. "YouTube" (selling tubes?). "SlashDot" (typography?) "MySpace." (online storage?)
c) Misleading. "WhiteHouse.com" (NSFW).
d) Just some parked domain with a revenue-generating search.
e) Typosquatting and fraud.

So, yes, maybe the price of, you know, avoiding issues like this uTube / YouTube thing is having an extra level of ICANN administration and 10 extra digits.

And maybe it isn't, but you can't simply go, "Well, I only want to dial 5 digit phone numbers" and make it true. When you get into big community efforts like the Web, you have to have some standardization, and a lot of time that means bureaucracy and a bit of redundancy.

Re:Mod Parent -1 Racist.

[Claws Of Doom]

http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/toolkits/rh0202.h tm National origins as defined by the British Government. So yes.

I knew I should have. . .

[Hamoohead]

. . .registered youtoob.com!

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Tim C]

If you're typing them at the command line that often, you can either use your shell history or script/alias it. If you're typing them in a browser, most (all?) browsers support bookmarks and auto-completion of URLs.

I personally think that the benefits of a more hierarchical system outweigh the potential drawback of having to type a little bit more occasionally.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Talian]

Wow, that's a lot of stupid.

Hmmm, let's sue Pizza Hut

[Phat_Tony]

My aunt's phone number is one frequently misdialed digit off from Pizza Hut. (Did you know that there are consistent frequently made mistakes in repeating certain sequences? These types of errors have far from a random distribution. For example people tend to drop the number "5" immediately following a letter in an alphanumeric sequence.) Anyway, she gets about 10 calls for Pizza Hut a day, mostly from drunk people late at night. (She lives near a major university.) She stopped answering her phone and screens her calls with her answering machine. Her answering machine now says "Hello. THIS IS NOT PIZZA HUT! I DO NOT SELL PIZZA! THIS IS A PRIVATE RESIDENCE! If you would like to leave a personal message for [her name], please leave a message at the tone. Again, this is NOT Pizza Hut."

She still gets a message every few days saying something like 'Yeah, man, I just want pizza. Hello? Hellllooooo!? I WANT A PIZZA! F*ck this, I'm calling Dominoes." Or sometimes even just leaving an order with a phone number and address and everything.

Yes, I know, she should get a new phone number. But she's never considered SUING Pizza Hut for happening to have a similar phone number.

Re:Hmmm, let's sue Pizza Hut

[Beardo the Bearded]

I get calls for Chinese food all the time.

I'll never change my number - it spells something cool. Since this is /. and it's full of idiots, I'm not going to say what it is.

What I do, and what I suggest your aunt does, is accept the calls and take the orders for the food. Tell them it will be ready for pickup or arrive in 30 minutes. They'll never call back, and if they do, that's when you pretend they never called and explain it's a private residence.

Re:Hmmm, let's sue Pizza Hut

[geekoid]

actually they will call back, because when it doesn't arrive they will just press speed dial.
Persoanlly, I would change it to a phone number that gets money for phone calls.

1-800 phone directory?

[tepples]

I would check a phone directory before calling a supposed good number.

Which (printed) phone directory includes a reasonably comprehensive list of national toll-free (1-8xx where x in {0, 6, 7, 8}) numbers? The local phone directory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, seems to list only those businesses with a local office, and when I tried this experiment, there wasn't much of a World Wide Web to speak of.

Re:1-800 phone directory?

[VincenzoRomano]

I meant "goggle" in the sense of "something that sounds very close to the guys I'd like to contact".
Yahoo has been much better: they registered almost all domains with similar sounds or typings as "Yahoo".

Where were they BEFORE?

[mark-t]

Utube had plenty of time to sue Youtube for trademark infringement, yet they didn't choose to sue until the latter were bought by someone with really deep pockets.

I think Utube waited too long... if they were that concerned about trademark dillution, they should have taken action months ago.

Cost?

[Mattwolf7]

The lawsuit, filed this week in US District Court, asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com or pay Universal Tube's cost for creating a new domain. It did not specify damages.

So... $8.95/yr WHOIS says Oct-2008, so lets give them 3 years to be fair, plus the time of the tech to switch the DNS entry. Ok so that totals to be about $100.00 UTube Cash, Check or Credit?

Re:Cost?

[MrP-(at work)]

After reading the interview with the CEO that was linked in another post, and seeing that.. I think what google should do is simply take control of utube.com and put a page with 2 links "looking for youtube videos click here" and "looking for universal tubing click here" and then link to their new domain that they bought for them.

simply and cheap for google and allows the tubing company to get back to business

Re:Cost?

[geekoid]

except thats not very professional and can cause a loss in business.

An earlier poster hit the solution on the head, redirect to youtube of a utube commercial. Have that page look professional with a link that says "For more information about universal tube, please click here.

That way utube customer see something professional, and youtube customer can use it just like normal youtube.

Cheap webhosting for a 12million dollar business

[Cartack]

Look at the hosting plans their isp provides http://www.1net4all.com/hosting.htm Basic Corporate Enterprise Setup $14.99 $29.99 $59.99 Bandwidth 500 MB 2 GB 8 GB 250 MB Additional Bandwidth $9.99/month Maybe they are so upset because they are using webhosting designed for mom and pop sites.

What utube should have done

[slapout]

Redirect everyone coming to their site to a youtube.com video of an advertisement for utube. And in the description say "if you would like to purchase our product, click here". Then people who are really looking for youtube will get there (and see a utube ad). And people who are looking for utube will think they're just watching a utube ad before entering the utube site. Problem solved.

Re:What utube should have done

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... "X sues Y" means that X thinks that Y is doing something wrong and that *Y* should do something about it, not the other way round.

Re:What utube should have done

[austinson]

I for one am guilty of accidentally typing utube.com looking for youtube.com. If anything, this is a bonus for Universal Tube considering the extra exposure they get from stupid URL mistakes. That's the only reason I actually know who they are and what they make.

Heaven forbid someone with the URL mcarrie.com sue mariahcarrie.com because of a name clash. If the company went to great lengths to create a truly unique name (ie Kodak, Xerox) then, ya, this would be a problem, but it's not. Maybe Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation (utube.com) should be dueling it out with Universal Tube Inc. (universaltube.com) instead of YouTube for name clashes.

But of course, if Google's policy of 'no evil' holds firm, then they should consider renaming the youtube.com domain to gtube.com or gootube.com and use the youtube.com domain the same way FireFox the company and FireFox the browser share the firefox.com page to redirect visitors properly.

Re:What utube should have done

[dizee]

why is this modded insightful? this does't fix the problem. the issue is with people looking for utube.com visiting youtube.com instead. the only thing your suggestion does is divert traffic from utube.com to youtube.com, increasing youtube.com's advertising revenue and introducing complexity into the web experience, potentially harming sales from confused individuals.

think before you post, slapout.

Re:What utube should have done

[Mahler]

What YOU should have done, is contact someone at utube directly about this idea and perhaps gotten some kind of reward for a brilliant idea. Now somebody else will take credit for it or even worse, they might never hear about it...

Re:What utube should have done

[mumrah]

Or maybe utube should have bought some ads from youtube. Have a front page with the youtube ad and a link to the real utube site. Talk about click-throughs!

Re:What utube should have done

[slapout]

I was under the impression that they are suing because of all the traffic coming to utube.com from people who are trying to find youtube.com. According to this:

"The company, which sells used machinery for making tubes to clients worldwide, has seen its site utube.com knocked off line by millions of online searchers looking for video site."

Get rid of the TLD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we use TLD's at all? The intent of TLDs was to organize sites by category, and it has clearly failed. TLDs add no useful context to a URL. Most people assume that *every* domain is a dot-com, or don't even know that there's anything "dot"-else.

So why not get rid of TLDs? Phase them out. Or consolidate them into one .web or .goatse or .whatever domain, and leave the "official" ones like .gov and .mil and .de and .uk (because the bigwigs that control the tubes would pee their pants otherwise)

TLDs were intended to provide additional context to URLs. They don't. Get rid of them.

And lose my favorite game?

[Chris Burke]

It's a heirarchical system that has been abused by the registrars to the point where it's effectively a flat naming system; *.com.

Or *.net or *.org, which nobody uses correctly anyway, so it's basically a completely flat namespace with a couple different optional endings and a couple actually meaningful ones (.edu and .gov).

But your idea has basically two problems, in increasing order of importance:

1) Creating and managing all the sub categories, and making meaningful and enforceable categories. Is a veterinary supply store blah.pets.shopping.com or blah.medical.shopping.com or blah.medicine.pets.com or blah.veterinary.medical.com or... You see? And what happens when somebody thinks they need a new category? They wait for ICANN or whoever you think should be administering these things? Um, no. They'll do what happens today: use whatever is most convenient. Thus you get non-network providers using .net, and commercial ventures like slashdot.org using .org. Would somebody come around to investigate slashdot's not/for-profit status and deny them the name? This confusion would result in your idea's original purpose -- to divide domains by their markets so that brand confusion is less of an issue -- to no longer work, because as a practical matter nobody would expect that the category in the domain name would match the actual market.

2) I could no longer play "enter a random website name into the address bar and see what pops up".
This is a very fun game. Go ahead and try it! I just entered "giantbanana.com" into the address bar and got a web page with some crazy stick-figure artwork on it. Next I tried "mastication.com". A web site devoted to chewing, perhaps selling chewing aids and with a bulletin board about chewing different types of food? No! They sell polymers and sealants, apparently. If I had to also guess the random category that 'mastication' was filed under, I'd never get to it.

Please don't ruin my fun!

U2 (u2.com) should start a video sharing service

[openright]

Perhaps they could put some of there own videos there as a kick start.

Website 101

[haberb]

Depending on how long Utube.com has been online, they really should have been prepared for this. Trademark issues aside, anyone who relies on their website for their business should really consider purchasing as many variations of their domain name as they can possibly afford. There's very little reason not too as cheap as domain names are these days. Otherwise fair is fair.

Re:In related news(OT)

[foobsr]

You use my long established "subline". I'll sue you :)

CC.

The internet is not like a truck

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I would say Utube has more clout than many of your realize, as they may know the internets better than any of us...

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Of course, those of us running software like Asterisk (properly configured) never even noticed that they had to add the 3 digits.

If you are smart enough to configure Asterisk correctly, then memorizing even a 23 digit phone number should be easy.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[reed]

Your super-hierarchical scheme sounds like a huge scam for registrars, since you'd have to register 15 domain names instead of 1 in order to get into each relevant category for your business.

On the other hand, local TLDs should be used more.

Why can't youtube run a simple little thing for a few months on the side (disabled if cookies show a youtube account) that says ("Looking for Universal Tube Company? Click here."). That's the way reasonable website owners have been solving this problem for years.

Reed

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Anonymous Coward]

So really, this should be the hierarchy for the .us zone, and .com/.org/.net should be abandoned.

Re:Utube isn't going to get anywhere with this cla

[geekoid]

" Likelihood of confusion between YouTube (videos online) and Utube (tubing) is infinitesimally small."

really? if it is so small why are they suddenly gettng 68,000,000 hits a month?

If they loose sales because there service is down they loose money.

"Domain name sound-alikes do not a successful trademark case make."
not true at all. There was the Madonne('singer')/Modonna hospital is just one of many examples. Madonna won claiming that her trademark 'Madonna' was more recognizable then Madonna...as in The Madonna. A name the Madonna infringe upon to use to build her success.

They have had the domain since 1996, and you don't HAVE to be registered to have a trademark. It just makes proving it easier.

Dialing Common Numbers Directly

[Petersko]

"You've either got a great memory for all those 10 digit numbers you have to remember, or you don't have many numbers to remember."

For at least my top twenty most dialed numbers, I never use a search. Unless your memory is completely buggered, or you call people very infrequently, you should be able to remember your most used numbers.

On my phone I have to press three or four buttons to get to the name in question, then select between office/home, and then press a button to dial. It's easier to just dial the number directly - I don't even have to look at the phone to do ir.

Re:Dialing Common Numbers Directly

[Gr8Apes]

You've got a crappy phone, or a whole lot of numbers in it. I briefly owned a Motorola, simply hated the interface. Most of my entries have 2-4 numbers associated with them, sometimes more, so having to page through multiple entries for Tom Smith, then Richard Smith, and then a couple for Harry Smith before getting to the "preferred" number for Harry blew chunks. My replacement LG phone would be 1-4 key punches for first letter, then 0-x to get to the name, and ring. That's if I have to look it up. If I've recently called them, it's send and the down arrow key a couple of times. If they're in my top 9, I have speed dials assigned, and it's two keys.

I stopped learning phone numbers for people I call frequently but don't need to know a long time ago when my phone became a nice repository for that info. As for "what if you lost the phone?" - nothing beats written down numbers. The electronic backup is also nice though.

Re:Dialing Common Numbers Directly

[mrchaotica]

On my phone I have to press three or four buttons to get to the name in question, then select between office/home, and then press a button to dial. It's easier to just dial the number directly - I don't even have to look at the phone to do ir.

If it's seven keypresses or less (including the "send" press), it's more efficient to go through the menu because you can just memorize the (known) sequence. For example, to call my girlfriend I press "down 6 6 down send," where the first press selects the address book (from the home screen), the second and third selects names starting with "N," and the fourth press chooses the second name. If I want to call her home instead of her cellphone (not often), I press "right" just before "send."

It's not a huge difference, but it is three fewer presses, and it can be memorized just as easily as a phone number.

Re:Dialing Common Numbers Directly

[Petersko]

"If it's seven keypresses or less (including the "send" press), it's more efficient to go through the menu because you can just memorize the (known) sequence."

It's only more efficient if you can actually do it faster. Without a doubt I can dial the numbers as fast or faster than I can navigate to the stored one. And if you're going to memorize a series of keypresses, why not memorize the ones that mean you can still call that person when your phone is sitting on the desk at home, and you're at a payphone?

Re:Dialing Common Numbers Directly

[Gr8Apes]

What's a payphone?

Are those getting to be about as rare as US postal mailboxes?

Not as dumb as it looks

[Kelson]

From TFA:

The lawsuit, filed this week in US District Court, asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com or pay Universal Tube's cost for creating a new domain. It did not specify damages. [emphasis added]

Simple solution: Google pays for registration of the new domain, takes over hosting of utube.com, and sets it up as a disambiguation page like firefox.com (which directs you to either the Firefox web browser or the Firefox consulting firm). Maybe help them pay for an ad campaign telling people about the new site, maybe reimburse them for some of the excess traffic costs.

Re:Not as dumb as it looks

[Vitriol Angst]

I disagree. The fact that "YouTube" sounds like "uTube" but sells a totally different product is unfortunate. Copyright, is to protect consumers from confusion in the marketplace -- not for company sales. They didn't put a Line over the U to stress it's long vowel form, so for all we know, it's pronounced "ugh-too'B".

Due to the use of every two syllable combination for a URL on the web -- it's impossible to NOT step on someone else. Is "sale4you.com" supposed to pay "saleForYou.com" or just "saleFourYou.com" or even "sale4u.com" or the p0rn site "sally4you.com" ? Or should Google just pay for that, since all of them were found on google with a poor description that confused the consumer?

The only difference here is that YouTube.com is popular -- otherwise, UTube.com would still have YouTub.com, uTub.com, and YooToob.com (I suppose for TellyTubby fans).

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Heian-794]

And how does this system handle multiple languages? Should one have to know the Danish word for "vendors" in order to type the URL of a Danish site that you want to do business with?

You could do a web search for the company's name and the product it sells and hope that it comes up immediately, but, in addition to the unneccessary load on search engine sites, you lose the advantage of being able to type URLs in directly and save time.

Apple records.

[matt me]

This is stupid. Like Apple records persisting solely to sue Apple Computer. There's no overlap in business beyond the name - no-one looking for 70s beatles recordings on ebay is going to get confused and buy a powerbook instead.

Also, the utube site is not difficult to find as below. It *is* difficult accessing it, it's been slashdotted! But there's certainly no overlap in business.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=utube

I can only hope..

[Sloppy]

..that contempt fines for such a meritless bullshit lawsuit, are so great that utube is financially ruined, and their owners all end up homeless and sucking HIV-infected cocks for the crack money that they need, just to get through another miserable day.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[geekoid]

no, the problem is people like you who clearly don't inderstand the internet.

Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

Google offered universal tube MILLIONS to buy the domain name utube.com weeks ago. This lawsuit is motivated by pure greed. They want to milk Google for as much as they can.

Re:Cheap webhosting for a 12million dollar busines

[geekoid]

Consider there business. It's not like a million hit a day business. The hosting services is fine for their needs.

Not so fine for the needs of youtube.

So many of you are going after utube like they should be designed to handle 68,000,000 hits a month.

Sheesh.
Granted, this fall under 'Shit happens' rule. It's nobodies fault. Like a guy unexpectdly dying from an annerism crashing into you. Nobodies fault, and your SOL. That happens in life.
On the plus side, this could end perfectly amiable with both side winning.

And you shuold ALWAY have a lawyer deal with these kinds of issues, because doing it yourself could unintentally cause far more harm then letting a professional handle it.
And of course, a lawyer know to get there attention, you nede to either personally know the other lawyers, or file a suit.

Read the Article Folks

[EconomyGuy]

This isn't a trademark issue, contrary to the original posters analysis. If you read the article you discover the complaint is not one of customer confusion (which is the core of trademark law) but one of nuisance. While the technologically inclined my simply say this is a product of people being stupid, the fact remains that it's not Universal Tube who is at fault. They aren't asking YouTube to stop being YouTube, they are asking for YouTube to figure out a way to get all of their customers to stop coming to their domain.

Real world example: Two stores next door to eachother. The customers of store A (which is far more popular) keep going through the parking lot of the store B. So many customers, in fact, that the few customers for B can't even get to the store. Certainly the law should provide a remedy for Store B, otherwise we are back to the world of "might makes right." A needs to provide some kind of mitigation for the activity for which it benefits and B suffers.

talk about poor management

[Dretep]

If I were the utube.com owner i would: a) Move the ordering system that customers use to another server; something like orders.utube.com on another physical machine b) Get some frickin advertising on the home page; 68 million hits in August? Think about the possible revenue! Welcome to /. utube!

I've got an idea

[devhen]

Google could offer to host utube.com and place on it a cute little page that asks "Which site are you looking for?" and links to both Universal Tube and YouTube. That way Universal Tube doesn't keep getting more traffic than its system is designed for. Of course, this would require that Google offer to host the domain landing page and that Universal Tube allow its domain to be taken over. Sounds like Universal Tube may not be the type of people that would consider this kind of compromise adequate. Oh well.

No respect for this domain "dispute" because:

[The Wooden Badger]

This one is much more compelling: http://nissan.com/

A car company tries to sue a guy for starting a website to sell computers based on his own name, Nissan. Go figure, a guy selling computers is first to get the nissan.com domain.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[mrchaotica]

Yeah, if you're too stupid to keep it synchronized with your PDA/computer/etc. and memorize the (relatively few) numbers you might need to call in an emergency.

Shame

[Tavor]

It's a shame Slashdot didn't link to Utube on the main page again. I'd like to see Utube try to sue all of Slashdot. Including me for causing so much traffic, and reducing their servers to molten goo.

AdWords?

[fleischdot]

I think they would make more money by using Google's AdWord program instead of sueing them ;). The original article noted 1.6 Billion PI's a month...

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[mrchaotica]

Hey, don't knock it -- that would make it a hell of a lot easier to maintain blacklists! (e.g. "deny *.spammers.com")

Change Subject

[sc0p3]

File this under funny. Com'on .. utube sues youtube..

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Chabil Ha']

Absolutely, so to make things simple, maybe we can just go back to entering a manual IP address again...

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Colin Smith]

Nope. All my socks are black.

HTH.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[mrchaotica]

No, .com/.org/.net should simply be limited to organizations that are international or entirely virtual (i.e. Slashdot, Second Life, etc.)

.mil, on the other hand, ought to become .mil.us, of course.

Bad precedent if Google Doesn't SMACK THIS DOWN

[XdevXnull]

Next on the hit list:

ubuntu.com
tutu.com
tubesocks.com
hullabalootube.com

What a lousy idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still people bitching about the Great Renaming of Usenet, and that was twenty years ago. You don't seriously imagine that people would just happily accept whatever slot in a predefined hierarchy they were offered, do you?

    Any attempt you make is going to be a crude fit to the naturally blurry roles that people and organisations filll. Ibm would have to buy loads of your domains, one as a software vendor, one as a hardware vendor, one for network security, one for network storage... how finely do you propose to chop these things up? It's an impossible task and no-one would sit still for it.

    Where would you file Shimmer?

      shimmer.dessert.toppings.food
      shimmer.toppings.desserts.food
      shimmer.polish.floors.household
      shimmer.floor.polishes.household ... etc etc etc.

    It would never work!

Re:Cheap webhosting for a 12million dollar busines

[Cartack]

What happens if utube is featured in a news story? or they receive publicity through some other venue? Are they ok hosting with a web provider that becomes unresponsive? I am sorry, but if i ran a 12 million dollar business, and my customer base depended on my website for business transactions, I would invest in a web host designed to handle such a task. That site may be responsible for millions of dollars in yearly revenue, and they settled for a $19.99 type service, that is probably running apache on a couple of overclocked celeron boxes. lolz

I wonder what type of redundancy power/bandwidth etc thier host offers (i wonder if they even know). I have been with a couple of shit hosts, so i know reliability can be a huge issue.

How much do you want to bet utube will be, or is currently revising their hosting options. Good businesses can forecast these type of problems.

utube.com is fat

[WK1]

So why does utube.com continue to have an excessively fat home page? Go there. Their home page is big. Too many images. Not as big as some, but big nonetheless. I'd think if they wanted to solve their problem, this would be the first step.

Re:Winning? Who said anything about winning?

[robbiedo]

Google should just host the site on their servers, put a link to redirect to youtube.com, and be done with it. I think the owner of utube.com has a legitimate complaint in the costs they are incurring due to the incredible rise in traffic. Google can effectively deal with this in a magnanimous and fair manner.

ManBearPig

[Aphoric]

and I suppose you also think he didn't invent ManBearPig!

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[seifried]

Apple and Microsoft also do hardware, services, are you going to list EVERY business function in the form of microsoft.*.com? This is by FAR the worst DNS proposal I've ever heard.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash. The original design of URLs was made with the intent that people would never see them. They were supposed to be an internal thing, no need for remembering them offhand; bookmarks and similar would take care of all of that.

Had that happened as intended, the grandparent's thoughts could very easily have become reality ... sigh.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Moofie]

If you could spell "hierarchy" correctly, I might take your idea seriously. Well, you would probably also need to come up with a good idea, instead of this one.

But keep working on it. Good luck.

Utube still has to fight an uphill battle

[Infonaut]

really? if it is so small why are they suddenly gettng 68,000,000 hits a month?

YouTube will argue that this is confusion about an address, not confusion about identity. People who intended to go to YouTube wound up at UTube, but not because they were deceived as to the identity of YouTube in relation to the identity of UTube.

If they loose sales because there service is down they loose money.

Is YouTube responsible for their service being down? Have they induced anyone into going to utube.com? If I prominently display my address as TymSmith.com, and people mistakenly go to TimSmith.com, is that my fault? Do sound-alikes create an obligation to defend against every possible variation? YouTube could also be interpreted as UToob, or EweTube.

There was the Madonne('singer')/Modonna hospital is just one of many examples. Madonna won claiming that her trademark 'Madonna' was more recognizable then Madonna...as in The Madonna.

The facts in that situation were complicated. The hospital was actually caught in the middle between Madonna and the infamous Dan Pirisi. It was also a WIPO dispute, not a US court case.

They have had the domain since 1996, and you don't HAVE to be registered to have a trademark. It just makes proving it easier.

True, it does make proving you have a trademark easier. A lot easier. When YouTube did a trademark search, UTube wasn't in the Trademark Office database.

I think the court will find UTube's argument unpersuasive, particularly because of the slippery slope implications. Anyone starting a new company or creating a new domain name would have to protect themselves from hordes of previously existing businesses with sound-alike names.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Lost Race]

Misleading. "WhiteHouse.com" (NSFW).

It's SFW now, but still pretty misleading.

A Quick Fix

[Vitriol Angst]

A quick fix would be for UTube.com to change their URL. Then make a real funny video about the whole mess, and put their new URL on it and post it to youTube.com.

Problem solved.

Make sure you have some hot chicks, and some silly dancing dog in the video.

Of course, there is not solution if you are just going out of business and nobody besides confused youTube freaks are your only accidental customers.

"Hey, this Vacuum Tube doesn't show any of the funny clips of Colbert cutting bears with his light saber!"

DDOS attack, in a way...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is it's a DDoS attack in a way. Here you are, running your site, minding your own (tube making) business, and suddenly your site gets hammered into the ground. You recover from the increased traffic, only to have it hammered down again through excessive traffic.

The only difference between what's happening here and a DDoS attack is intent. A DDoS'er is out to kill you, hordes of misstypers are just, well, misstyping. The people runing utube.com obviously are not making this distinction.

Trademark

[NoMorePoints.com]

ugh....so someone gets creative and the whole world comes to an end and the pocket books open up. What about the whitehouse.com site? No one ever complained about them! NoMorePoints.com

they're clogging the tubes!

[ic4x0r]

the internets are like trucks which go through tubes. you can't just dump an entire movie onto a truck!

Re:Icons are incorrect for story

[Miseph]

Well, except for the part about being all that funny.

And the part about the developer (or the WWE) getting sued for such a character.

With the exception of those two points, your post has great merit.

Oh, wait...

In Other News

[$0.02]

Utube.com is suing Slashdot.org becasuse of /. effect on that cause damage to their site.

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[StikyPad]

www.tell.someone.who.cares.about.long.addresses.co m

Hang on, my phone's ringing... Ah crap, it's the 1990s again. What do they want this time?!?

Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl

[Anonymous Coward]

bookmarks?

Re:Winning? Who said anything about winning?

[iamhassi]

"This tire maker or whatever is just looking for some publicity. "

If you RTFA you'd see publicity is one thing they're not lacking:
"The company, with just 17 employees, got 68 million hits on its site in August, making it one of the most popular manufacturing websites."

Not bad for a company that sells used machines that make tubes.

Honestly I don't see what the problem is. Most sites only dream of 68 milllion hits a month. Decrease the bandwidth load of the main page (they have a script the cycles through 100+ kByte gifs on the main page!) and put a link to YouTube on the top of the page, those two things should help bandwidth costs immensely.

Re:Icons are incorrect for story

[Firefly1]

When I heard about this, my first reaction was "why wasn't this case laughed out of court?". Right next to "how on Terra can anyone confuse an environmental organization with a sports-entertainment empire?". The fact of the court in question being British boggles a bit more - as I recall, both Scandinavian Airlines System and Her Majesty's Special Air Service coexist quite well, thank you very much. (check out the Wiki entry for the acronym itself)...
Reading the relevant section in the Wikipedia article makes mention of "a 1994 agreement regarding use of the WWF initials"... but provides neither details of nor a link to said agreement.
With these in mind, I ask: how, in the name of all which does not hug face, can anyone confuse utube.com with youtube.com?