Quite right too…… Nirvana has slapped Marc Jacobs International and a couple of big-name retailers with a strongly-worded lawsuit, claiming that the famed fashion brand “infringed Nirvana’s copyright, misleadingly used Nirvana’s trademarks, and utilized other elements with which Nirvana is widely associated to make it appear that Nirvana has endorsed or is otherwise associated with” Marc Jacobs’ “Bootleg Redux Grunge” collection.
Gives us an excuse to feature this which we’d suggest is what Jacobs and others are doing
Here’s the story from Fashion Law Blog
According to the complaint filed by Nirvana, LLC – the legal entity formed in September 1997 by Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and the Courtney Love-controlled Cobain Estate – in a California federal court on Friday, the late Kurt Cobain created Nirvana’s “Smiley Face” logo in 1991 and “Nirvana has used that copyright-protected design and logo continuously since [then] to identify its music.”
Beyond music, Nirvana – which is “one of the most famous and influential rock bands in history” – has “licensed its copyrighted logo on literally dozens of different t-shirts, shirts, hats, hoodies, bags, backpacks, glasses, wallets, and other items of merchandise, many of which have sold extensively for decades.”
Thanks to such extensive use, the “Smiley Face” design has “come to symbolize the goodwill associated with Nirvana,” thereby giving rise not just to copyright protection for the design but to trademark rights, as well, since “a significant portion of the consuming public assumes that all goods or services that bear the logo are endorsed by or associated with Nirvana.”
Against this background, LVMH-owned Marc Jacobs recently re-released its controversial Grunge Collection, which designer Marc Jacobs originally showed for Perry Ellis back in 1993. In that collection are “items of clothing that utilize a design and logo virtually identical to Nirvana’s [Smiley Face] image,” the complaint asserts, including t-shirts, sweatshirts, and socks.
However, unlike the Nirvana-logoed t-shirts being offered by Target or Urban Outfitters, for instance, Marc Jacobs allegedly did not receive authorization/pay a license fee to use Nirvana’s valuable intellectual property on its $115 t-shirts and nearly $200 crewneck sweatshirts.
