The next time you see a 16 year-old kid wearing a Misfits shirt, you can take solace (or get annoyed, perhaps) in knowing that Glenn Danzig isn’t making anything from it. Last week, on August 6, Danzig’s lawsuit against guitarist Jerry Only over who owned the trademarks to the band, including the “fiend skull” logo, was dismissed by a U.S. district judge. The court order essentially claimed that Danzig wasn’t really able to state why he should be entitled to a cut of Only’s merch. The 1994 agreement the band signed that Danzig sued over claimed that each co-owner of the brand, including Danzig and Only, had the “non-exclusive right to conduct merchandising and to exploit other rights relating to the use and exploitation of the name Misfits.” In other words, Danzig could be making his own Misfits merch, but if he does, no one else in the band can profit from it other than him.
So basically, the deal with Hot Topic that Only struck was a smart merchandising move on his part, and he beat the rest of the band to the punch. There’s nothing stopping Danzig from making a deal with, let’s say Target, to have Misfits shirts in there, so he might as well continue to dilute the band’s brand. Considering the band’s much more known for their Danzig-era albums and their merch than anything they’ve done musically for the last two decades, he might as well.
[via re-tox]
