US tube-maker Universal Tube, the owners of the domain utube.com, has filed a claim in the US district court demanding that YouTube either change its name (and domain) or pay for a new domain for it. The company says that its customers haven’t been able to access its Web site because it’s overloaded with hits from video viewers going to utube.com rather than youtube.com.
To be fair, their site does pre-date YouTube by 10 years, but rather than moan about getting a server-crashing 68 million hits in August, a litttle lateral thinking could easily make them some serious extra money from all that mistaken type-in traffic.
They could knock up a little video site and join Google AdSense.
They could sell the domain to Goooooooogle.
Or, better still, sell it to Yahoo! Video… Kerching!