Home Featured The Immortal Battle For The Name Rights To…IMMORTAL Continues

The Immortal Battle For The Name Rights To…IMMORTAL Continues

immortal black metal, The Immortal Battle For The Name Rights To…IMMORTAL Continues

It’s a battle of the ages!  An unstoppable force colliding with an immovable object!  The clash of two demi-gods in a legendary brawl where only one shall rise victorious and IMMORTAL!

Actually not really.  What’s really going down is IMMORTAL members Harald “Demonaz” Nævdal and Reidar “Horgh” Horghagen are involved in a legal dispute over the rights to the band’s name.

IMMORTAL was initially formed by Demonaz and Olve “Abbath” Eikemo in 1990. Horgh would then join the band in 1996. And then back in 2014, Abbath left the group in a pretty messy separation.

A highly publicized legal battle ensued over the rights to the IMMORTAL name with Abbath against Demonaz and Horgh.  Abbath would claim the other two guys walked away from IMMORTAL after they moved their gear out of the band’s rehearsal space. Despite that, the Norwegian court systems awarded the IMMORTAL name to Demonaz and Horgh.

Now it seems a new conflict has arisen between the two remaining IMMORTAL members, with Demonaz registering IMMORTAL with the Norwegian Patent Office as his band exclusively back in July 2019. The registration was approved, and he was therefore given the exclusive right to use the band name commercially. However, Horgh chose to appeal the registration, and the matter was ruled in his favor, meaning that Demonaz no longer has the exclusive rights to the IMMORTAL name.

Horgh claims he had no advance knowledge of the registration made by Demonaz.

“It could never have occurred to me to register the trademark by myself, as Nævdal has done here, but I have found myself having to fight to keep the rights I have earned through a long career in this band,” he said. “It is, and after all has been for many years, a large part of my livelihood.”

Demonaz told VG that he disagrees with the decision, pointing out that he is “the band’s only remaining original member. I am also the only one who has been on all of the band’s releases,” he said.

The Norwegian Patent Office ruled that the rights to the IMMORTAL name belong to the band as a whole, and not to the individual members.

“We have jointly as a band built up the trademark IMMORTAL, and it is therefore right that the trademark should be a joint ownership,” Horgh said.

The drummer went on to say that he is hopeful IMMORTAL can perform live again.

“It has been my goal all the way, and I know that this is something IMMORTAL fans want and have been waiting for a long time,” he said. “I hope in the long run that we can manage to put these disagreements behind us, and again look ahead as a band.”