20080416

Kling Klang battle, update



A short follow-up to this previous post:

One can sense a little bit of friction between the band Kling Klang and their management. Again according to Drowned In Sound, the band has issued another statement, in which they begin to conclude that "some members from their management failed completely to represent correctly their ideas about the entire matter. And blaming them for a misrepresentation that sprung from an ill informed employee is not right."

More quotes from the same article:

“In Cologne on Sunday 6th April the UK band Kling Klang were issued with a document by representatives of Messrs. Ralf Hutter & Florian Schneider of the German band Kraftwerk. The document is an order to cease and desist using the name "Kling Klang" as the name of the group. Since Messrs. Hutter & Schneider own the single-word trademark "Klingklang" (the name of Kraftwerk's studio, and publishing/merchandising companies), they feel that use of the two-word term "Kling Klang" as a band name is an infringement of their trademark rights.

“The UK band Kling Klang arrived at the name by way of an onomatopoeic reference to a guitar improvisation of binary structure, and were under the impression that "klang" is a German word for sound, with "kling klang" meaning "bell-sound" (similar to "ding dong" in English). The term appears to be in popular usage in more than one language, including Swedish, and the band in no way thought they would be infringing upon the trademark rights of Messrs. Hutter and Schneider in utilizing this term as a name for the group.

“Kling Klang holds Kraftwerk in the highest esteem as musicians and hope to resolve this matter quickly and amicably.”


Kraftwerk are known for having made similar threats before, sometimes valid but sometimes not at all, for ending auctions of bootlegs, promos and similar collectors items from eBay, and for having sent rather unpleasant threats of legal action to force a fan to delete a site with an address that contained the word Kraftwerk. It will be interesting to see where this ends.

1 comment:

  1. Hi - ! Great blog, lots of stuff that I wasn't aware of (although a life long avid collector of KW).

    Re. Kling klang: Probably first with this was Goethe in Faust. Try find a html text online of "der tragiöde erster teil" and search for it. The expression surfaces in a fight...

    Greets!

    Isoa.

    ReplyDelete