Invisible Fence Doesn't Get It
Regular readers will remember that the lawyers for Invisible Fence had objected to some aspects of my site describing my experiences as an Invisible Fence customer and why I found their product useful. I used the site as a simple AdSense case study. I made several changes to the site to accomodate their wishes, but I didn't acquiesce on everything. Although I'm traveling right now (which is why I haven't been posting very often lately… things will go back to normal after Labour Day), I do check my email occasionally, and I was surprised to receive yet another complaint from the Invisible Fence lawyers. Here's the text:
Eric,
Our client appreciates your continuing efforts to comply with our requests and the revisions you have made thus far to your website. As I had noted in my prior email, however, there are still two lingering issues concerning your Pet Fence Guide website, located at the URL, http://pet-fence.ericgiguere.com (the “Website”), that should be addressed.
First, in the top section of the Website's home page, there are links to phrases incorporating the term “invisible” and “fence” or “fencing” (such as “invisible fencing,” “invisible pet fence,” etc.). INVISIBLE FENCING is a registered trademark (U.S. Reg. No. 1371021) of our client, “Invisible Pet Fence” is a phrase that is confusingly similar to our client's registered trademark, INVISIBLE FENCE (U.S. Reg. No. 1600470), and INVISIBLE is also a registered trademark of our client's (U.S. Reg. No. 1765230).
As you detail in your blogs and books, these links are means by which you direct traffic and make money from the entities that appear as sponsored links when one of those links are selected by the visitor. This is problematic for our client because you are essentially using our client's trademarks as a means to direct traffic to websites belonging to our client's competitors, such as High Tech Pet Products. While I understand that the sponsored link results are produced by Google, you have complete control over what phrases are atop the home page of the Website. Accordingly, we ask that you take down any of the links atop the Website that use any phrase incorporating the term “invisible.”
You noted in your prior correspondence to me that you had had discussions with the Invisible Fence marketing department. I understand from my contact at the company that while you were permitted to attach a link to Invisible Fence's website, the company did not permit - as they were unaware of the situation - you to continue compromising the Invisible Fence trademarks by using them as search terms on the Website.
Second, while there may arguably be some fair uses of the marks in the source code, those marks that are included in the meta tags (specifically “invisible fence” and “invisible fencing”) serve no purpose other than to direct traffic to the Website, whereby you will profit from visitors who select the links atop the Website's home page. Accordingly, these two marks must be deleted from the meta data located in the source code of the Website.
Kindly contact me if you have any questions. Your assistance and continued cooperation is much appreciated.
This is starting to get annoying. As I've tried to explain to them before, those links they're objecting to are actually AdSense link units and appear automatically courtesy of Google, totally out of my control. They should go after Google for those.
However, there are two aspects to their letter that I find particularly objectionable:
- The idea that I'm “permitted” by Invisible Fence to link to their site. No one needs permission to link to a site, that's simply ludicrous.
- The request to remove Invisible Fence keywords from the meta tags because they're there to direct search engine traffic to my site. If those tags were completely unrelated to the site I'd have to agree, but in this case they're not: the site is about Invisible Fence products. And it's a positive site to boot. This is why their marketing department was happy to see the site.
I'm going to sit down and write a reply to these folks, but I wish they'd spend their time more productively than going after a happy (well, maybe not so happy anymore) paying customer of theirs. Maybe I'll just take down the site entirely. But that's what they want. Or is it?
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?
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