Small Firm Sues YouTube Over Website Name, Insisting “We Were Here First”
Posted November 2, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Now that story has taken a new twist and it’s about to put a small David against a very big Goliath in a lawsuit that could yield some huge dollars.
It began with the explosive popularity of Youtube, the web video sharing site that was recently purchased by Google for a stunning $1.65 billion.
The publicity from that sale, the increased number of high speed connections and the growing popularity of video over the web all brought even more visitors to the site, youtube.com
That’s a good thing if you’re Google.
But it was a disaster for a company known as Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., based in Ohio. For years, the address they’ve used to allow customers to access their inventory of tubes and pipes is utube.com.
But so many people were accessing their domain by mistake, it caused the servers to crash over and over again. And the firm was lucky if the site stayed up for more than an hour a day. Things still aren’t back to normal.
Now owner Ralph Girkins has made good on his threat, suing the online portal for damages and the cost of potentially changing its web address.
“We’ve had to move our site five times in an effort to stay ahead of the youtube.com visitors,” Girkins grumbles.
The suit doesn’t specify specific damages but the company is demanding YouTube stop using that name on its site or pay Universal the cost of creating a new domain. And you can be sure that won’t be cheap.
Girkins insists he’s lost large amounts of money because his customers are having so much trouble accessing his products. “We were there first by 10 years,” he points out.
How bad did things get? Universal Tube’s less than exciting site received an incredible 68 million hits in August alone, turning the otherwise obscure firm into one of the most popular manufacturing web destinations in the world.
YouTube has so far failed to comment on the suit, but it seems impossible to contemplate that the Internet giant would even consider changing its now legendary address.
So if Girkins wins, it will truly be a victory for the little guy. The company with the boring and unwieldy long name boasts only 17 employees.
Still, stranger things have happened.
In 2000, the World Wildlife Fund sued the giant World Wrestling Federation over the use of the initials ‘WWF.’
The wrestlers lost that round and have since changed their name to WWE, using an automatic text editor to erase every reference to ‘WWF’ on its website and records.
