これは商標を守るための革新的なやり方だ。カナダのバンクーバーのSmashLABは、2000年にロンチしたオンラインのデザイン＆マーケティング企業だ。彼らによると、経営は万事順調、そこへ突如、Discovery Channelが同名のテレビ番組を開始した。

問題は、SmashLABという名前が使われたことではなく、あまりにひどい番組なので同社に苦情が殺到すること、そして検索すると、同社までがひどい会社のような見かけの結果になってしまうことだ。そこで同社は、これまで読んだいろんな公開書状の中でもけっこう笑えるやつをDiscovery Channelに送って、もうすこしましな番組にしてくれと頼んだ。

以下が、その書状だ：

Dear Discovery Channel,

Since 2000 we’ve had a nice little design studio called smashLAB and we work hard on it every day. People (generally) say nice things about us, and we were starting to make a good name for ourselves.

Then along you came with your fucking awful television program with the same fucking name. Surely you researched this before airing the program. I can only suppose that you felt we were so small that you could just poach it. Fine enough–I guess that’s life.

The problem is that your program seems to suck. So now when someone does a Google search for “smashLAB”, they find endless posts about how badly “smash lab sucks”. Great. Now we suck by association, just because you lifted our name.

We know there’s no way you’ll change your name, but maybe you could make your show suck a little less? (We’d really appreciate it.)

Yours truly,

Eric and Eric

Two guys named Eric
(whose company used to have a fine name)

よくやったね、SmashLAB（同社のこと、テレビ番組のことじゃないよ）。

[原文へ]

（翻訳：hiwa）