The firm wants YouTube to pay the costs of moving it to a new
address or stop using the address youtube.com. It has filed a case
with the US District Court to pursue its claims.
The company says that it has owned the web address for 10 years,
and that its business has been disrupted by millions of web users
mistakenly going to utube.com instead of YouTube.com.
"We've had to move our site five times in an effort to stay
ahead of the YouTube.com visitors," Ralph Girkins, Universal Tube's
president, told news agency AP.
Universal Tube said that the visitor numbers to its site had
risen dramatically in recent months and that the company struggled
to cope with the traffic. It said that the site had 68 million hits
in August.
A notice explaining that the site was back online and had had to
move provider because of the traffic volumes early yesterday. By
the close of business yesterday that was replaced with a 'service
unavailable' notice.
Universal Tube and Rollform Corporation sells used equipment
that makes tubes and has 17 employees. It said that it was hoping
to sell the controversial web address and locate its own services
at a new address.
YouTube was bought by Google in an all share deal worth $1.65
billion in October. Universal Tube said that its side had to be
shut down for a number of days when the deal was announced because
of the additional traffic.
