The US Postal Service has been hit hard by the rise of the internet. Email has cut into their letter carrying business, but interestingly, a collaboration born on the internet is helping to help promote their services and strengthen their brand name. Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard are west coast musicians who struck up a long distance collaboration. After sending music bits back and forth, they were able to piece together an electronica-meets-indie-rock album named "Give Up" that was released in early 2003. The album eventually sold nearly 400,000 copies on the Sub Pop label, but from that popularity a problem arose regarding the collaboration's name 'Postal Service'.

Last August, Tamborello and Gibbard received a cease-and-desist order stating the Postal Service name violated a US Postal Service's trademark. At this point, things could have gotten ugly, but the band and the US Postal Service saw a synergistic opportunity (registration required) that would benefit them both.

[T]his week the United States Postal Service - the real one, as in stamps and letters - signed an agreement with Sub Pop granting a free license to use the name in exchange for working to promote using the mail. Future copies of the album and the group's follow-up work will have a notice about the trademark, while the federal Postal Service will sell the band's CDs on its Web site, potentially earning a profit. The band may do some television commercials for the post office.

With this cooperation the band will receive valuable promotion, while the USPS will reach a group of people that is more likely to head for the inbox instead of the snail mail box. While it is refreshing to see trademark infringement result in cooperation instead of litigation, the circumstances behind this agreement favored the former over the latter. There is little chance a fan of the band would mistake it for the mail service, so the risk from dilution of the Postal Service name was minimal. Also, each side stood to gain from the strengths of the other. One thing is for sure, Tamborello and Gibbard wouldn't have received the same cooperation if they chose the name "Outlook Express."