An edited version of the email correspondence: Jonah Peretti filled out Nike's online form to personalise shoes, choosing "sweatshop" as a personal logo.

Nike's first reply:

"Your Nike iD order was cancelled for one or more of the following reasons:

1 Your personal iD contains another party's trademark or intellectual property.

2 Your personal iD contains the name of an athlete or team we do not have the legal right to use

3 Your personal iD was left blank. Did you not want any personalization?

4 Your personal iD contains profanity or inappropriate slang, and besides, your mother would slap us."

Peretti countered:

Sweatshop is not 1) another person's trademark, 2) the name of athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. "I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you ship them to me immediately."

Nike decided "sweatshop" was inappropriate slang.

Peretti wrote: "after consulting Webster's dictionary, I discovered that `sweatshop' is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: `a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and in unhealthy conditions' and its origin dates from 1892."

Final salvo from Nike: "Nike reserves the right to cancel any personal iD up to 24 hours after it has been submitted."

Peretti didn't get his personalised shoes.