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And Finally Artist News Legal
Rage Against The Machine issue cease and desist over Nigel Farage’s podcast
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 11 July 2018
Rage Against The Machine have reportedly sent a cease and desist letter to your old mate Nigel Farage over his LBC podcast Farage Against The Machine.
The band hit out at the former UKIP leader and persistent panic peddler earlier in the year when he first launched his podcast with a pun-tastic name that doesn’t really work.
A post on the band’s semi-official Twitter account at the time stated: “Failed right-wing British politician Nigel Farage has called his podcast ‘Farage Against The Machine’. This pissweasel IS the machine – peddling the sort of inane, blame-heavy bullshit that the guys in [Rage Against The Machine] have been raging against since day one”.
According to gossip site The Blast, a cease and desist letter sent to Farage this week by RATM’s legal reps continues on that theme. It states: “RATM has publicly denounced the type of right-wing ideology you espouse for decades; in fact, that has been an integral part of the band’s identity and purpose”.
It goes on: “Your anti-immigrant rhetoric, lack of social compassion and barely disguised racism and xenophobia are the antithesis of what RATM stands for. Stop using RATM’s name and logo, change the name of your podcast and find some other target to troll. We suggest President Trump”.
Farage, of course, considers the Trump to be a good friend and has been scoring extra airtime of late by pretending (presumably) to be deeply offended by that baby Trump blimp that will fly over London when the President visits the UK later this week. Pretending to be deeply offended by said balloon allows Farage to participate in one of his other favourite pastimes, which is laying into London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose office gave the required approval for the blimp to fly.
RATM’s letter goes on to state that Farage’s podcast “brazenly and unlawfully exploits our client’s name and logo”. It then demands that he stop using the name ‘Farage Against The Machine’ for his podcast-based panic peddling, and that he ceases putting out any material that “falsely associates you, your colleagues at LBC … and your far-right political views with RATM”.
It’s not entirely clear quite what the legal grounds for blocking Farage’s podcast brand would be. RATM did register the trademark in their name in both the UK and the US in the 1990s, but the trademark registries in both countries now list those marks as being ‘dead’, presumably because the required paperwork wasn’t filed to keep them active.
There may be claims beyond trademark. Although so true are RATM’s protestations that Farage’s political ideology is the direct opposite of everything they stand for, they might struggle to persuade a court that anyone would assume that the former top UKIPer’s online ramblings are in anyway endorsed by the band. Well, not in the UK anyway.
We await Farage’s response. Just as soon as he’s finished pretending to be outraged by a balloon.
