Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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....
liqbase
"Universal Tube, which sells used machines that make tubes..." Well now we know who built the backbone of the Internets
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.
How long before they go after ewetube?
I know, that was baaaaad.
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.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
You could have just read the first few paragraphs of the article. Utube was first by about 10 years apparently.
And now that utube has just been slashdotted things can't be looking up for Universal Tube.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
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.
youtube sues Utube for lost of profit due to lost traffic.
CC
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
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.
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.
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?
liqbase
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.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
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.
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.
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.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Next they'll come for my site about ovine obstetrics, ewetube.com
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...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.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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
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.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
They're mad because their servers couldn't stand against traffic?
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
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.
Heh, yeah. That's exactly why I never put links to my sites on here. You guys are t3h cloggers of t3h tubes!
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
Maybe if they had less than 107 images on their front page they wouldn't have so much of a problem.
Advanced users are users too!
wow a site called websiteoptimisation thats mega-slow AND doesn't work on firefox?
Thats l33t.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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.
ooh, the wayback machine is fabulous, here's a rant I wrote years ago about ICANN and the flatness of the current DNS system.
And of course we now have phishing problems as well. Oh happy days.
Deleted
actually I take that back, now its working its quite cool, albeit under IE.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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:
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?
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
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?
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.
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
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Because when Billy says to Jimmy check out youtube.com, Jimmy isn't going to accidentally type universaltubes.com....
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.
God Be Gone
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
How much would a link farm pay for the name?
How much would a YouTube competitor pay to auto-redirect to their site?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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.
Of course, Cisco routers don't power the internet. Unless they now make routers with integrated power plants. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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....
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.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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!"
bang goes my karma... again...
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. ;P
Anyway, utube is a better domain than youtube
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
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
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
News at 11?
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
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.
The degradation of the English language into "u r not able to spell" can hardly be blamed on YouTube/Google, can it?
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
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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.
partially regruntled codemonkey bloomington, illinois
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.
I'd just love to type those long addresses all the time.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted
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.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
Who said anything about set in stone? youtube.webservices.com and utube.equipment.com.
Deleted
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.
No sir I dont like it.
I don't know if you'd noticed but there are already national DNS zones.
.fr .dk .es .fi .at .pt .se .be .gr .ie .nl .it .de
e.g.
Deleted
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.
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.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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.
No, Data flies a starship. His evil brother Lore takes the bus.
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 ?
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.
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
UTube was there ten years before youtube.com
/. gets dumber everyday.
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
OK bitches mod me down now I got tons o' karma.
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.
Hell is other people's code.
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!
Nein. Enter: SueTube.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
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.
The saddest poem
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
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/
..with all those tubes, they can build their own Internets! With blackjack, and hookers.. in fact, forget the YouTube and the blackjack.
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.
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.
This has got to be the first time I've ever heard of someone sueing someone over free advertising for a website. Sam
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
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
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
images.google.search.internet.service.provider.com mercial? What's long about that?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
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.
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!
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....
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.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Let me guess, you sort your socks before putting them away - right?
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.
liqbase
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
He's a loathsome, offensive brute, yet I can't look away
Wait wait you forgot:
5alc934mz85f7sdj40b.emailreplies.spammers.com
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
"(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.
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...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Welsh is a race?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Youtubes very existence has resulted in a lot of traffic to utube.com, virtually none of it likely to be interested in tubing.
... oops the utube site is down...
If this was true then slashdot is in for some major lawsuits. I mean harm through negligence is what we do
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Says the person who is clearly not the one paying their hosting bills.
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"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!
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?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
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.
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.
Informatus Technologicus
http://utube.com/
-- Boycott Shell
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So put up some google ads that points to youtube. Profit from peoples mistakes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Dominant Meme
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*
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
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!
Maybe we should have registered youtube.com back in 1996 when we registered utube.com. Not that anybody would ever confuse the two.
-Chris
Time IQ - Web Based Time Tracking
Can you give me an authoritative source with information about Google's using W3C's HTML validation in the PageRank calculation?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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
davecb@spamcop.net
"Hence stuff like .bank, .retail, .energy, .telecom etc etc."
.bank domain name? Will GoDaddy et al do their due diligence and make sure, or would they rather make a sale?
.bank ( or even .bank.com ) It must be a bank!"
Do you have to prove that you are a bank in order to get a
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
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
put up a couple of ads and laugh your way to the bank. Forget tubes, welcome to the advertising world.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
"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?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
--
Real News without sensationalized crime and celebrity gossip
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
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..
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.
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).
You, sir, are officially an idiot
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Because the existence of universaltube.com and universaltubes.com don't DDOS utube.com on a daily basis?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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.
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...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I don't know what the problem is. I didn't have any trouble accessing http://www.ewetube.com/.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
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...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
On an industrial corporate website? Dear slashdot, I would so wish that you had a clue.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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.
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 . . .
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Ohhh dear god I hope that it's because the domains names are actually similar and not because YouTube is higher ranked on Google...
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.
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
Right, hierarchical organization. Worked really well for Gopher... until it got extinct, that is.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Of course it can be. It's a slashdotting that never ends.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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:)
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).
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!
All views my own. Anyone else with the same views needs to have his/her head examined.
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.
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.
http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/toolkits/rh0202.h tm
National origins as defined by the British Government. So yes.
. . .registered youtoob.com!
"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Wow, that's a lot of stupid.
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.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
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.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
It's a heirarchical system that has been abused by the registrars to the point where it's effectively a flat naming system; *.com.
.gov).
.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.
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
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
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!
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
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.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
Perhaps they could put some of there own videos there as a kick start.
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.
You use my long established "subline". I'll sue you :)
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I would say Utube has more clout than many of your realize, as they may know the internets better than any of us...
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.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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
Apparently, Apple Records saw it coming ;o)
" 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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"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.
From TFA:
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.
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.
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
..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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
no, the problem is people like you who clearly don't inderstand the internet.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
RTFA
People are currently confusing the two.
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.
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
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!
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.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
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.
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!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
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...
Hey, don't knock it -- that would make it a hell of a lot easier to maintain blacklists! (e.g. "deny *.spammers.com")
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
File this under funny. Com'on .. utube sues youtube..
Absolutely, so to make things simple, maybe we can just go back to entering a manual IP address again...
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Nope. All my socks are black.
HTH.
Deleted
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Next on the hit list:
ubuntu.com
tutu.com
tubesocks.com
hullabalootube.com
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
Hehe, I just popped over to "eyepod.com", sure as hell some hopeful squatter has it.
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.
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.
and I suppose you also think he didn't invent ManBearPig!
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
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.
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.
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.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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!"
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
the internets are like trucks which go through tubes. you can't just dump an entire movie onto a truck!
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...
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Utube.com is suing Slashdot.org becasuse of /. effect on that cause damage to their site.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
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?!?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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?
- White Knight of the Order of Mihoshi Enthusiasts
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
Advanced users are users too!
That's like my idea for Wookiepedia..
which is totally what she said