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The spaceman sues Dido
Dido stuck a NASA picture on the cover of her 2008 record, Safe Trip Home. It features a tiny little astronaut floating in space.
Trouble is, the astronaut, Bruce McCandless (no, I hadn't, either) is suing claiming that the use violates his privacy rights.
Sure, you go floating in space you don't expect to be papped, but... seriously?
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As Techdirt observes:
[I]t's difficult to see how much of a claim he has. It's not as if he's identifiable in the image, or that anyone will see it and think: "Hey, I'll buy this album because I know astronaut Bruce McCandless endorsed it." That's ridiculous. Most people will have no idea who the astronaut is, nor will they even care.To be frank, the hardest thing for McCandless to do is to prove that anyone knows who he is before he can start to claim people are trading on his image. Surely this is just a shot of an unnamed guy at work?
Also: why has it taken him two years to file this claim? Has he been on Mars or something?
3 comments:
Agreed that I'm not sure if there's a huge amount of merit in his claim, but the tone of this is a little unfair... McCandless was the first person ever to do a spacewalk without being tied to anything, so photos of him free floating in space carry a bit more weight (pun not intended); you'd never dismiss a Neil Armstrong picture as being some bloke at work just because some other people went there subsequently.
He was also the Capcom voice on Apollo 11, so he's quite iconic for space nerds, although I'd wager there's little crossover between this group and Dido's core audience...
Cold, barren, lifeless, no atmosphere... And the first album wasn't much better.
Sorry, I've got a stinking cold and that's the best I could do. I'll try harder next week.
I wonder if he's decided to sue now because of the Vampire Weekend case?
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