Nirvana sued over t-shirt artwork dating back to 1989

What? There’s no Agloe, NY circle of Hell?

3 Likes

And he left out the Gowanus Canal!

3 Likes

Maybe.

Their DB doesn’t seem to have anything for 1949. I don’t know if they just haven’t got to that yet, or if there’s another reason. From there, I believe that there are PDFs of the catalogs for each year which can be reviewed manually.

1 Like

Who does she think she is, Disney?

2 Likes

I never read it. Are never-ending copyrights one of the nine circles of hell?

7 Likes

I’ve got a Weird Al shirt from the Stupid tour, 1985 I think, and now I know where to market it! Thanks!

1 Like

May I suggest this completely original t-shirt motif instead?

image

6 Likes

I thought “nearby” gentrification (read: influx of trust-fund babies/artistes/trendy restaurants) was spurring on some GC cleanup. (I left Williamsburg long before gentrification and can state that GC back then was Hell’s hell.)

1 Like

I hope all the lawyers are working long hours on contingency and the courts eventually throw the case out.

1 Like

Hopefully, you’ve paid “Bob” every year.

4 Likes

Maybe getting marksmanship lessons from Ernest Hemingway?

2 Likes

They should just join forces and make an NFT (non-fungible t-shirt) out of it and collect the big $$$

2 Likes

This gets the Gold Medal for stupidity, as the original poem is from the 14th century. I know, the image in question is not, but still!

Also,why reproduce such a shoddily-made drawing? Ten minutes with a pencil and voilá, a different and not-lawyerable image! Because drawings like that have adorned copies of the work since its first publication, and it’s pretty much in Da Public Domain by now.

Yeah but what about his medical bills? He probably still hasn’t paid this off

1 Like

That shirt design has been out of print for probably 30 years. I seem to remember it had the Subpop logo on it too. If you can find a used one it will cost you a pretty penny - I saw a well used one in a vintage clothing shop in Tacoma, WA priced at $1400 (fourteen hundred! dollars!!!) last month. In contrast, a Camper Van Beethoven tour shirt that was probably older for only $125 at the same store.

2 Likes

The suit also claims that Nirvana has alternately implied that Kurt Cobain created the illustration, or that it’s in the public domain in the United States, and thus usable without obtaining proper authorization or paying a licensing fee. Bundy calls these allegations “false,” arguing that Scott-Giles’ illustration is still protected under U.K. copyright law and has not fallen into the public domain there, meaning it should not be considered in the public domain in the United States either.

The image was published in 1949. So the copyright probably expired in 1977. If that’s true, then the case rests on the entirely wrong assumption that the US has to protect a work for as long as the author’s home country does.

It’s possible copyright in the image was renewed in which case copyright might run until 2005 so there could be a few years worth of infringement to claim. But I doubt it. According to Wikipedia, only 15% of works published before 1964 had their copyrights renewed. It seems unlikely this image would be one of those 15%.

3 Likes

It is from the Sayers translation, which does a strikingly good job of even reproducing the original rhyme scheme. The Inferno is by far the best of the three, good enough for repeat reads – I’ve read the Sayers Inferno two or three times, mostly because Dante had an axe to grind with a bunch of folks and by golly, he’s not shy about making sure they got theirs, and is in fact quite spitefully nasty about it.

Sayers spends a lot of time annotating the poem to make things clear, and this does in fact contribute significantly to one’s enjoyment of the poem. Not everyone knows which noblemen and clergy Dante was mad at, and the notes make things considerably clearer.

The Purgatorio is okay, but because everyone’s going to be okay, eventually, Dante’s level of vindictiveness is much less. Plus we lose Vergil at the end, and Vergil is a mensch.

Still haven’t read the Paradisio; even Sayers admits between the lines that it’s much less strong of a work than either of the others.

7 Likes

You say “waste of societal resources,” I say “paycheck.”

I’m no expert in UK copyright law, but it seems plausible that UK copyright law and US copyright law were not in sync during the relevant period. The plaintiff here contends that the image was still copyrighted in the UK when Nirvana began using it.

The problem with metadata is that, unless you steganograph the data into the picture itself, it’s trivially easy to remove, if you know how.

1 Like