Look how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 15 years 4 months 7 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

Aflac is trying to get someone to make changes on their website, claiming that they’re guilty of Federal Trademark violation merely by using the letters a-f-l-a-c as part of a file name.

Even more ridiculous, this is being requested of one of their own licensed agents, with a circa 1998 website that’s never even been moderately SEO’d.

Last week, this e-mail arrived from Aflac Brand Protection:

Dear NAME REMOVED:

As you may know, American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus (Aflac) has used the name and mark Aflac to identify insurance underwriting services for over forty (50) years.

Aflac owns numerous trademark registrations for the Aflac trademark (“Aflac Mark”), including Reg. Nos. 1,570,222, and 1,679,644, registrations which are valid and incontestable.
It has come to our attention that http://www.DOMAINREMOVED/filename-changed.html includes Aflac in its meta data.

We believe that your use of our Mark is an obvious attempt to attract internet traffic to your website while capitalizing upon the goodwill associated with the Aflac name.

Such use of Aflac may result in trademark infringement, dilution and unfair competition in violation of the federal Trademark Act of 1946, 15 U.S.C. Section 1051 et seq.

In any event, Aflac requests that your company discontinue any and all use of Aflac at http://www.DOMAINREMOVED.COM/filenamechanged.html

Please reply to this email confirming your agreement to this request, and your agreement that you will not use in the future any mark or name similar to any Aflac trademark, service mark or URL, to conduct any business or activity on the internet.

Aflac reserves all rights, remedies, and causes of action it may have in this matter

Name Removed | Brand Protection Coordinator
Marketing Services
New Media
Aflac Worldwide Headquartersma
emailremoved
(No phone number was provided or I’d have phoned)

Huh? “…an obvious attempt to attract internet traffic to your website” – Doesn’t the mere existence of the website itself make it pretty obvious that the agent is trying to attract customers?

I took quick look at the site, then viewed just that file, and saw that is was a navigation sidebar.

On the site, there is no AFLAC logo (although there should be 😉 but there IS a button for “Get more AFLAC info” which is a graphic, and leads to a form.

Viewing the source code, you can see that either on the navigation file in question, OR on the Aflac form, the word AFLAC is not in the title, not in the description tag, and it’s not one of the meta keyword tags.

Other than mentioning in the body of the page that he’s an Aflac agent, and then in the body of the form once, that’s it – No other mention of Aflac.

So, I sent back this e-mail –

There’s no Aflac in the meta data – it’s an image to fill out an application! No keyword, no title, and no meta tag at all – not even text or an ALT tag!
What’s the problem?

To which I received this reply:

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your email.

For your convenience I have copied and highlighted the meta data at http://www.DOMAINREMOVED.net/filenamechanged.html. Aflac continues to request that your company discontinue any and all use of Aflac at http://www.DOMAINREMOVED.net/filenamechanged.html

And then they proceeded to provide the entire source of the page, with a couple of lines highlighted.
To save space, I’ve snipped those lines, where they remain UNEDITED.

img6on = new Image();
img6on.src = “./images/aflacon1.gif”;
img6off = new Image();

img6off.src = “./images/aflacoff1.gif”
This creates a hover effect over their menu, and is merely a reference to a file that contains the six letters in their name.

Then this:

<a target=”content” onMouseOver=”imgOn(‘img6’)” onMouseOut=”imgOff(‘img6’)” href=”aflac.html”>
<IMG SRC=”images/aflacoff1.gif” NAME=”img6″ border=0 alt=”Area Info” width=”141″ height=”44″></a></td></tr>

Which again, is part of the navigation, and simply provides the link to the form, asking to be sent some Aflac information

So, I sent them this on August 13th –

But that’s not “meta data”, those are file names, and aren’t subject to Trademark, are they? One is a page name, .html and one is just an image reference, and the letters Aflac only make up part of the file name.

I can’t believe Aflac could legally demand that nobody use “those letters” in a row for their file names under trademark law. This sounds like Aflac is overreaching a bit, doesn’t it?

Sincerely,

Now, five days later, I’ve still not received an answer, but I’ve been thinking about it, and here are some questions that are on my mind…

• Isn’t a licensed AFLAC agent allowed to mention the fact that they do that for a living?
• Does a trademark mean you hold the trademark on use of their five letters in a row?
• Was this really looked at by someone that knows and understands what they’re doing?
• What in the code exactly is covered by trademark law?

I think this shows an incredible lack of knowledge about what they’re “enforcing” and amazingly poor marketing judgement too, by Aflac.

Perhaps lawyers can’t be expected to understand all the intricacies of HTML, but surely the ones in charge of enforcing trademark law should know the basics, shouldn’t they?

Also, why would any clear thinking company choose to prevent a licensed agent from legally marketing their own product, making their stockholders money?

Does this blog post violate a trademark? For example, I DO seem to have meta data, with the word AFLAC in my description tag, and in the meta keyword tag, so am I in violation of trademark law too?

This makes no sense to me, and just sounds to me like an overzealous and uninformed lawyer making demands about something they don’t even understand, simply because they can.

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