EFax Threatens Its Competition

eFax is undoubtedly the largest “email fax” provider online. They’ve got name recognition, a large marketing campaign, and a knack for intimidating the competition. Why do I mention intimidating the competition? If you sign up with any online fax affiliate program, you’ll probably notice wording that says something to the effect of “you may not bid on the eFax trademark” or “you may not bid on our competitors’ trademarks”.
eFax has been (illegally) bullying it competitors with legal threats when it sees competitors (or affiliates of its competitors) advertising on its trademarks. While it’s fine to make a gentleman’s agreement when it’s beneficial to both parties regarding no competitive eFax gets the upper hand in all of these deals. Their partners can get a significant number of sales by bidding on the “efax” term on Google, eFax won’t receive many sales by bidding on their competitors (eFax’s competitors tend to have very low branded search volume). Therefore, eFax can protect itself by threatening the competition & lose nothing themselves.

It has been proven in court that bidding on a competitor’s trademark is perfectly legal in the United States (see Geico’s lawsuit against Google). However, eFax still threatens its competitors with legal action regarding this. Furthermore, the eFax trademark at the US Patent and Trademark Office (serial number 76524244) has a 2(F) designation, meaning that the trademark “efax” has potentially generic uses (such as describing an “electronic fax” or “email fax” service).

From what I can see, there is no legal basis eFax’s threats. eFax continues to threaten its competitors with baseless legal action, eFax is harming competition in the online fax industry.

As an affiliate, I could keep bouncing between eFax competitors… but there are only one or two online fax affiliate programs that (so far) have not been threatened eFax. Unfortunately, those programs don’t pay well enough to bid on the keyword “efax“. Oh well, time to move on.

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