So my wife calls me at work late Friday afternoon to tell me that I've just received a 5-page fax from Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, the lawyers for Invisible Fence, Inc. (You can see where this going already, can't you?) Yes, they are unhappy with my Invisible Fence Guide, which I've mentioned and discussed many times here as an AdSense case study.
It occurred to me shortly after starting the Guide that my use of the Invisible Fence trademark, which is owned by Invisible Fence, Inc., might be an issue, despite the fact that my site actively promotes the use of the Invisible Fence electronic pet containment system. Since I had already started, I decided to forge ahead without complicating the issue by rewording and renaming things, but now that time's obviously arrived.
Over the next week, then, I'm changing the Guide to remove most uses of the words “Invisible Fence” and replace them with more generic terms like “pet fence”, “electronic pet containment” and so on. I've already done the first step and moved the site to the “pet-fence” subdomain on EricGiguere.com. If you have a site whose domain name includes trademarked terms, you might consider doing the same. Sites with generic names like stroller-advisor.com and wireless-digital-cameras.com won't run into these kinds of issues, of course.
Anyhow, as I change the site I'll be making a few more postings here discussing various trademark issues in relation to AdSense. That fax I received is actually a good thing, because it's given me a wealth of things to discuss, especially the law firm's dislike of Google's ads that feature their client's trademark. More on this tomorrow.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.