Ninth Circuit upholds ruling on Nirvana Circles Of Hell copyright dispute
completemusicupdate.comThe US Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has upheld the ruling in a copyright dispute over the circles of hell image famously used on Nirvana’s merchandise since the 1990s.
The appeals court concurred that the dispute would be better fought out in a UK court.The image in question was seemingly created in the late 1940s by British writer CW Scott-Giles, depicting Upper Hell as described in Dante Alighieri’s ‘The Divine Comedy’.
Scott-Giles’ image then appeared in a Dorothy L Sayers’ translation of the fourteenth century poem.The lawsuit over Nirvana’s use of the image was filed in 2021 by Jocelyn Susan Bundy, who says that she is the sole surviving relative of Scott-Giles, who died in 1982, and therefore the successor-in-title to his copyright.Her lawsuit claimed that Nirvana had been using the image for decades without getting a licence.
However, she had only become aware of that fact in early 2021, hence the somewhat late-in-the-day litigation.In the original judgement on the case, judge Dale S Fischer noted that there was a dispute over who specifically owned the copyright in the circles of hell image.Meanwhile, because Scott-Giles created the image in the UK, it enjoyed direct protection under UK copyright law, with any enforcement of the rights in the image in the US based on the global treaties that connect the British and American copyright systems.
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