Nirvana, their record label Geffen and Marc Jacobs have reached an agreement in their dispute over the ownership of the group's over-the-top smiley face logo, featuring two Xs for eyes and an irregularly drawn tongue sticking out of the mouth.
It all started in December 2018, when Nirvana sued Marc Jacobs for using the band's logo on some items from the Bootleg Redux Grange collection: instead of the word “Nirvana”, it read “Heaven” (the Christian-Catholic alternative to the Buddhist nirvana) in a font very similar to the one used by the band, and the initials M and J in place of the X-eyes.
The band has accused the brand of copyright infringement. Kurt Cobain is said to have designed the Nirvana logo, but the theory is uncertain and somewhat legendary: in statements prior to the lawsuit, both Grohl and Novoselic had said they did not know, or could not remember exactly, where that variation on the smiley face.
Marc Jacobs also responded with a lawsuit. The artist Robert Fisher, a former collaborator of Geffen (Nirvana's record company), also joined the legal discussion and said he was the author of the crazy smiley. According to Fisher's lawyers (the statements are reported by Billboard), «Nirvana would have profited enormously from Fisher's work for thirty years through the sale of a significant number of products», managing not to compensate him and appropriating his work.
Even if this were found to be true by a court, Fisher's copyright could be challenged since the logo was allegedly made for Geffen, which could assign copyright to the label and not the creator.
On July 9, the three parties announced that they had reached a mediation agreement coordinated by Magistrate Steve Kim. The agreements are still informal but, as he writes Rolling Stone USare expected to be officially closed in the coming weeks.
