Over the years a number of webmasters have reported receiving cease and desist email notices from payment processors, particularly from MoneyGram. Here are some old threads going back over a decade referencing such email messages:
"Moneygram lawyers" from March 2004
"Legal Notice from Moneygram" from March 2004
"Letter from MoneyGram" from February 2005
"MoneyGram Name/Logo Use" from July 2006
"Attack of Moneygram" from June 2009
Although there are no recent threads I could find on the topic, I know for a fact that MoneyGram continues to send cease and desist notices to affiliates. I received such a notice myself earlier this month, and had also received one a couple years ago.
I can say that I responded to both requests I received, explaining why I believed our use of their trademark was fair use allowed under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (since we operate subject to U.S. laws), that our content was not misleading or deceptive, and that we did not in any way hold ourselves out as having any business relationship with MoneyGram or offer payment processing services using MoneyGram. In my reply I also informed them that we had carefully reviewed the list of operators we understood accepted payment through MoneyGram, and that we would promptly correct any errors or omissions in the list of sites accepting MoneyGram if they observed any instances where the data we reported was factually incorrect.
So, my question for this week is have you ever received a cease and desist notice asking that you remove a reference to a trademark, such as one to MoneyGram? And if you have received such a notice, what action did you take? Did you do as asked, did you ignore the request, or did you take some other action. I'm sure I'm not the only affiliate site operator that has refused to comply with such a request on the grounds that such a demand is without legal merit. But I also know that many affiliates receiving such requests do choose to comply with them.
Michael