Great post on Jay’s Blog about the owner of Utube.com which is an industrial tubing and supply company that had the good fortune of acquiring a domain name that is very similar to Google’s wildly popular Youtube.com site.

Situations like these are murky.  As an individual domainer I would not want to build my fortunes on a portfolio of similar situations like these, because owning this name for nothing more than the third party monetization of the name could be argued as typosquatting (law open to different interpretations depending on circumstances surrounding each situation and content displayed).

In this tubing company’s case, they have a company/mark which predates Youtube’s. This is the Internet equivalent of building your tubing company on the vacant lot next door to the Walmart super-center and capitalizing on the drive-by traffic.

These situations are much more common than you’d think and illustrate the problem with trademark holders over-reaching for all conceivable variants of their brand (where others may have a legitimate right to use).