Burned by the dead

Kurt Cobain of the grunge band Nirvana committed suicide in 1994. His widow, Courtney Love, zealously guards his estate. London - Dead celebrities are hot.

From Einstein to Elvis and Gene Kelly to Orville Redenbacher, they keep popping up as posthumous pitchmen for everything from cars to cola. But when the London office of Saatchi Saatchi, part of the Publicis Groupe, recently featured images of Kurt Cobain and other dead rock stars in ads for Dr. Martens footwear, the agency and its client got burned.

Courtney Love, Cobain's widow, grew angry when she heard about the ads, which ran in a small British music magazine called Fact. One of the ads showed Cobain, who was the lead singer of the band Nirvana, sitting on a cloud in the sky, draped in robes and shod in Dr. "She thinks it's outrageous that a company is allowed to commercially gain from such a despicable use of her husband's picture," a spokeswoman for Love told People magazine.

It was hardly the first time that Cobain's image had been used for commercial gain. According to Forbes magazine, which compiles a list of the earning power of dead celebrities, he came in first last year, just ahead of Elvis Presley, reeling in $50 million for his estate. In this case, however, what started out as a legitimate use of the photo of Cobain, along with images of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, Joey Ramone of the Ramones and Joe Strummer of the Clash, went wrong because of a series of missteps and the border-hopping power of the Internet.

Saatchi Saatchi said it found the images in the Corbis photo library and obtained copyright clearance to use them in Britain. Corbis owns the Roger Richman Agency in Beverly Hills, Calif., which arranges licensing deals for a number of deceased celebrities.

The trouble began when an employee - disobeying instructions, Saatchi Saatchi insisted - submitted the images to www.AdCritic.com, an American ad-industry website.

In the United States, the estates of dead celebrities are allowed to control the use of their images; in Britain, lawyers say no approval is needed. In this case, however, Airwair International, the British company that makes Dr. Martens, was not impressed.

It fired Saatchi Saatchi, canceling its contract with the agency, reportedly worth $9.9 million over three years. Kurt Cobain of the grunge band Nirvana committed suicide in 1994.