A Winning Solution for Youtube and Utube? Corresponding Trademarks and Domain Name Sharing‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION In Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp. v. YouTube, Inc. (1) ("YouTube litigation"), the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio granted in part and denied in part a motion to dismiss various claims against the YouTube video-sharing service. (2) The plaintiff was Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. (3) Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com, which is phonetically the same as YouTube's domain name, youtube.com. (4) Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. (5) As a result, Universal claimed that it experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. (6) Universal's servers were initially unable to handle this traffic, which resulted in interruptions to its online business. (7) The YouTube litigation, although factually idiosyncratic, raises questions about how effectively current laws and policies resolve disputes in which two different companies assert trademark interests that correspond to the same or similar domain names. (8) In fact, since the inception of the domain name system there have been many examples in which several parties with legitimate trademark rights assert claims to the same corresponding domain name, such as when several companies whose name included the word Delta all sought the domain name delta.com. (9)