Music

Fun fact, the Foo fighters own all of their music. They're one of the few if only bands that actually do. The main reason is the fact that after Nirvana Dave grohl had fuck you money. This is one of the reasons why that band is so special. For them it is all about the music. It didn't start out as a struggle. All of their catalog is a passion project, and that's pretty cool.

That said, I doubt a lawsuit would really go anywhere.

There’s also something in copyright law called moral rights which can’t be transferred, although they can be waived. It’s possible to retain moral rights even if you sell your music to someone, and moral rights allow you assert some control over your works where you think misuse of it would cause harm to your reputation, amongst other things. I’m not a copyright lawyer or anything, but I’ve dealt with a bit of this stuff through open source software licensing, and it’s come up a few times when I was transferring licenses from companies I used to work for. If they didn’t waive moral rights then that would perhaps be an avenue to prevent misuse, but again, an actual copyright lawyer would be able to better determine that.

Edit to add: I did some reading on this and more rights are not quite a thing in the US, but it’s a thing in Canada and other Berne Convention countries, but the US does have something similar but separate from copyright. The US has moral rights in some states but not others, and they have something called the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 that intersects with the idea of moral rights but is more narrower than general moral rights and only covers certain visual arts. In any case, I still haven’t gotten my law degree since this morning, but the basic gist of it is that the US has a different spin on moral rights than I’m familiar with in Canada, so they’re not equivalent, but there still may be standing for such a move by a musical artist.

Dammit. You’re probably right, and I hate this situation.