Here’s an innovative approach to defending a trademark. Vancouver, Canada based SmashLAB is an online design and marketing firm that launched in 2000. Everything was going fine, they say, until Discovery Channel launched a television show with the same name.

The problem isn’t the use of the SmashLAB name, but rather that the show is so bad that people are complaining, and that now their company “sucks by association” when people search on the name. So they’ve written one of the funnier open letters I’ve ever read, asking Discovery Channel to simply “suck less.”

Here’s the letter:

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)

Well done, SmashLAB (the company, not the TV show).