"Swimming baby" loses superfluous lawsuit against Nirvana

I'm sure all of your remember the famous album cover of the baby swimming on the Nevermind album. It was a pretty great shot for an album cover and it said a lot about humanity. It is ironic that later on, that same baby who was all grown up decided to try to go swimming for dollars by suing Nirvana as well as Curt Kobain's estate for millions of dollars claiming that the album cover negatively affected his life.

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Many years later this famous baby would go to shows and make money by selling his autograph to people that thought it would worth something and he would even get a giant and stupid "Nevermind" tattoo across his chest to I guess celebrate it.

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I'm not a big fan of tattoos anyway but when someone does something like this I immediately presume that they are a few beers short of a six pack mentally speaking. He would do recreations of the album cover from time-to-time and again, he would do this in order to make money. There is probably something legal that Nirvana, or their record label, could have done to prevent him from making this money but they did nothing of the sort.

According to rumors the reason why Specer Elden decided to sue the band and anyone else associated with it was because he had asked Dave Grohl to help support his artwork and Grohl either didn't get the message because he is a super-famous and very busy rockstar that probably doesn't pay a great deal of attention to messages or requests like this, decided to not support this person that he doesn't even know. This angered Elden and shortly thereafter he sued Nirvana.

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Is he talented? I don't friggin know but I also don't pay much attention to art, especially not modern art. To me his work reminds me of my college roommates stuff and that roommate was in art school and honestly, his stuff wasn't very good and he ended up doing something not art related for a job.

I think that Spencer could have made a living doing this simply by being known as the Nirvana baby and things would have been fine, but he saw an opportunity to get some free money and was probably hoping for some sort of settlement out of court.

I was delighted to see that a judge ruled against him and he will be receiving nothing from Nirvana, Grohl, or anyone else affiliated with the album in the 90's that kind of changed music as we know it.

At one point Elden's lawyers attempted to turn this into a "child sex trafficking" lawsuit, which is completely absurd.

What really happened here is something that I really don't like about the United States and is something that I am very happy doesn't exist over where I live in South East Asia. People in the USA will sue people for absurd amounts of money claiming emotional distress and loss of wages because something affected them mentally. This can't really be quantified and it is up to how shady your lawyer is whether or not it can actually go to trial. I've heard a ton of stories about how very wealthy people or groups, knowing that a drawn out lawsuit is going to cost a fortune in legal fees, will simply pay the person who is suing them simply to get them to go away. Normally this settlement comes with the condition that they cannot be sued for this ever again. It's all a silly game that makes lawyers a ton of money and there isn't really any justice there because more often than not, the plaintiff is merely looking for a quick way to make some completely undeserved money.

For Spencer, if he hadn't been featured on the Nirvana album cover, he likely would have had no claim to fame at all. Now he has had his 15 minutes and everyone, and I think rightfully so, thinks that the guy is a scumbag chasing fortunes that are not his to claim. I am very happy that he failed completely in this effort and now Nirvana and the other defendants can never be sued by him for this ever again.

In a way I kind of feel bad for Spencer Elden. He could have ridden this wave for the rest of his life and probably made a good living selling very average art if he had just played it cool. He certainly would have had an edge over other people in the same industry and being the "Nevermind Baby" probably would have opened a lot of social doors for him that for the rest of us would remain permanently closed. Instead, he got greedy, and now he has burned that bridge and everyone in the music and probably art industry wants nothing to do with him.

He almost certainly would have been invited to any event that was going to honor Nirvana and lets face it folks, that is going to happen for as long as Spencer is alive. Now they will go out of their way to make certain he isn't even mentioned. Way to go, idiot. You got what you deserved.