Guinness World Records PR Fail

And the Guinness World Record for failing at Internet PR goes to… Guinness World Records Ltd.

Recently, FAIL Blog posted a story with a screenshot of the Guinness World Records website, showing the record for “Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Attack”. Underneath details of the record, was a link cheerily inviting the reader to “Break this record!”.

It’s clearly a standard part of their site template, but was amusingly unfortunate appearing on that particular record.

However, in a show of complete lack of humour and PR, Guinness World Records Ltd decided to send the owners of FAIL Blog a legal bluster email stating that the GWRL logo is trademarked and demanding that it be removed from the page in question.

I’d like to think that use of a company’s logo when talking about them would be covered by fair use, but fair usage is increasingly murky and hard-to-define legally.

FAIL Blog have decided to comply by blurring out the GWLR logo, but I can’t help thinking GWRL have really shot themselves in the foot by bullying FAIL Blog into removing the logo (even if the GWRL name wasn’t mentioned, you’d easily guess).

This is how *not* to do PR in the Internet age, folks.

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