A person stands casually, their hands tucked into the pockets of a hoodie emblazoned with the word “Nirvana” and a smiley face underneath.
You’re probably thinking of the time when Nirvana took Marc Jacobs to court over using a smiley face logo that looked a lot like theirs without getting permission first, right?
Well, after more than five years of back-and-forth legal wrangling, the two parties have decided to settle.
The corporate entity representing Nirvana brought a lawsuit against Marc Jacobs International back in 2018, following the announcement of the “Bootleg Redux Grunge” clothing line. Central to the lawsuit was a smiley face logo that Nirvana’s representatives claimed was “strikingly similar” to the band’s own copyrighted design.
Nirvana’s smiley face logo, familiar to many since the early ’90s, features an unevenly shaped head, crossed-out eyes, and a wavy smile with a tongue sticking out to the right. In contrast, the Marc Jacobs version, used in both their clothing designs and promotional materials for the collection, had a similar look but replaced the X’s with the letters “M” and “J.”
Nirvana has consistently used its smiley face logo since the release of the “Nevermind” album in the early ’90s. This iconic symbol has appeared on a wide range of merchandise, from T-shirts and hoodies to shot glasses and more.
Gigi Hadid poses in front of a backdrop adorned with squiggly-mouthed smiley faces, promoting the “Redux Grunge Collection.”
Marc Jacobs’s 2018 collection was a nod to the designer’s 1992 grunge collection for Perry Ellis, a line that both led to his firing and marked his emergence as a significant figure in the fashion industry.
The 2018 campaign also made several references to Nirvana’s music. For example, the product pages on Marc Jacobs’s website featured the phrase, “This bootleg sure smells like teen spirit.” One promotional image, included in the lawsuit, showed Marc Jacobs himself wearing a T-shirt with a smiley face logo above the words “COME AS YOU ARE.”
Nirvana’s legal team argued that the use of yellow-and-black color schemes and similar fonts on the shirts further heightened the resemblance to the band’s well-known designs.
These various similarities were perceived as a deliberate attempt by Marc Jacobs to create an association between the clothing line and Nirvana without authorization, with the intent of making the grunge connection appear more genuine, as detailed in the lawsuit.
In response, Marc Jacobs International filed a counterclaim, challenging the validity of Nirvana’s copyright registration for the logo and questioning the narrative that the band’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, had personally drawn it.
The terms of the settlement, filed on July 9, have not been disclosed, and representatives for both Nirvana and Marc Jacobs have remained silent on the matter.
The settlement also addressed a separate legal claim from Robert Fisher, a former artist at Geffen Records, who asserted that he was the actual creator of the smiley face logo.
Copyright disputes are a common occurrence in the entertainment industry. Just last year, the Supreme Court ruled against the late artist Andy Warhol, determining that he had no right to use a photographer’s image of the musician Prince in his artwork. This ruling narrowed the scope of the fair-use defense, particularly in commercial contexts.
Marc Jacobs did not pursue a fair-use argument, which, according to Daniel Lifschitz, a litigator specializing in copyright law, would have been a difficult route due to the company’s intent to sell clothing.
Lifschitz, a lawyer at the Beverly Hills firm Johnson & Johnson who also teaches about the Nirvana-Marc Jacobs case at U.C.L.A.’s extension school, emphasized that the central issue was the specific selection and arrangement of design elements.
He explained that while a generic smiley face cannot be copyrighted, a specific arrangement of unique features, like those in the Nirvana logo, can be protected.
“Marc Jacobs miscalculated in the design process, assuming that a basic smiley face couldn’t be protected by copyright,” Lifschitz noted. “That was a poor judgment call.”
