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Canadian politicians red faced over Nine Inch Nails copyright infringing t-shirts
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 8 July 2015
A group of Canadian politicians have had to withdraw t-shirts promoting their campaign for re-election after it turned out you can’t just slap a Nine Inch Nails logo on something without permission. I mean, who could have guessed?
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi recently showed off the t-shirts, which promote the two of them, along with Edmonton mayor Don Iveson, as “building Alberta together”. When combined, initials of the trio’s surnames can be arranged as ‘NIN’, so they basically just printed this tagline under the Nine Inch Nails logo.
But speaking to the Edmonton AM radio station, reports CBC, Iveson said this week: “We got advice that there were some concerns about the trademark and essentially to cease and desist”.
Presumably Trent Reznor was too busy with Apple Music shenanigans to be monitoring use of his own intellectual property anyway.
A spokesperson for Nenshi apparently said that only three of the t-shirts were actually produced, and there were never any plans to put them into wider production. Possibly because ironing cheesy slogans onto band t-shirts is expensive and time consuming.
