3 Count: Nirvana’s Upper Hell

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1: Nirvana Sued for Copyright Infringement Over Use of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ Illustration

First off today, Jon Blistein at Rolling Stone reports that the granddaughter of artist C.W. Scott-Giles has filed a lawsuit against the band Nirvana claiming that the band has been infringing a drawing of his for decades.

The drawing at issue is a diagram of Upper Hell from Dantes Inferno. According to the lawsuit, the band has used the diagram, or a drawing extremely close to it, since 1989 and made claims both that the work was in the public domain and that the band owned or created the drawing.

According to the lawsuit, the drawing was originally published in 1949 and is still in copyright within the United States. Failing that, the lawsuit alleges that it is still under copyright in the UK. The lawsuit is demanding that merchandise bearing the lawsuit no longer be sold, that the band provide an accounting of profits from the image as well as damages related to the infringement.

2: Cox Accuses BMG, Rightscorp of Misfiling Copyright Notices to Inflate Claims

Next up today, Blake Brittain at Reuters reports that the ISP Cox, as part of their ongoing lawsuit with BMG Rights Management and Rightscorp, are claiming that they misfiled DMCA notices with them in order to build allegations that the ISP was not adequately responding to them.

The lawsuit sees BMG and Rightscorp claiming that Cox is liable for much of the copyright infringement that takes place on its network because of their lack of response to DMCA notices. However, Cox is now claiming that they moved their DMCA agent to a new email address in 2017 and that Righscorp, unlike most filers, did not make the change to it.

According to the filing, Cox informed Rightscorp of the change both in 2018 and 2021 but, in neither case, did they change where they sent the notices, sending some 75,000 to the wrong address in April alone.

3: Court Slams Allarco ‘Pirate Device’ Lawsuit, Refuses to Ban Sales at Staples & Best Buy

Finally today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that Canadia broadcaster Allarco’s lawsuit against retailers Staples and Best Buy is not going well for the company as the judge has tossed much of the case.

First, since Allarco is a licensor of content and not a copyright holder, the judge demanded that they bring rightsholders into the case to serve as plaintiffs, they failed to do so. Second, the judge said that Allarco failed to provide any evidence it was being harmed by the activities of the defendants, prompting him to deny an injunction.

The scathing ruling goes on to say that there is no serious case in this lawsuit and tore into an expert witness for Allarco, which claimed that the devices had no legitimate use despite the fact they come pre-installed with Netflix, Hulu and other services.

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