Mr Baldwinson said the Dream Troll image was created only as a “parodic piece of
shareable content on social media”. It was a nod to the influences on the band, and a
fun way of making a connection to Black Sabbath. I have described the Dream Troll
image in paragraph 4 above.
18.
The white “S”’s on the Dream Troll image were similar to the “S”’s used on the Black
Sabbath poster for its album entitled “We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘n Roll”. That
album had the words “Black Sabbath” where the words “Dream Troll” were on the
Dream Troll image. The “S” in “Sabbath” was also stylised. The colour scheme in
the Black Sabbath album cover used red words on a black background with the white
“S”’s. The evidence showed that the Black Sabbath album had sold about 2 million
copies in the USA and about 60,000 copies in this country.
19.
The Nazi “SS” symbol stands for “Schutzstaffel”. The “S”’s in the Nazi “SS” symbol
were stylised and were vertical and had flat ends on the “S”’s. The two “S”’s were
together. The colour scheme on the SS logo in the bundle before me was white
lettering on a black background.
20.
There were other examples of Nazi propaganda in the evidence before me. These
included Gothic white lettering on a red background. Other colour schemes, and in
particular the swastika on armbands and armbands were black, white and red. A
poster showing a SS soldier showed that he had the two “S’s” on his collar with white
lettering against a black background and two “S”’s on his helmet, with black lettering
against a white background.
21.
There were other examples of stylised “S”’s in the materials before me. One was the
“S” shape between Stage and Truck where the “S” shape was in a lightning shape
with a pointed end to the “S”. Kiss, another heavy metal band, had used stylised
“S”’s for the two “S”’s of “Kiss” in promotional material, and it was common ground
at trial that that image had been banned in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Israel
because of its association with the Nazi “SS” image.
22.
The evidence shows and I find that the Dream Troll image is based on the Black
Sabbath album cover. This is proved by the hashtag which was used for the tweet on
behalf of the band, which was hashtag Black Sabbath and the agreed evidence of Mr
Baldwinson. The evidence shows that the Dream Troll image, as set out in paragraph
4 above, was tweeted by the band on 31 March 2017 and also placed on Facebook,
albeit without the hashtag Black Sabbath. It is common ground that at the time of Mr
Burgon’s guest performance on the song for Dream Troll and until he was told about
the Dream Troll image on 14 April 2017 in the circumstances set out below, Mr
Burgon was not aware of the Dream Troll image.
Mr Burgon’s Facebook post about the band and the song
23. On 11 April 2017 Mr Burgon made a Facebook post which publicised his interest in
music and his appearance on the Dream Troll track. The picture of him singing or
speaking was shown with the following words above it: “Away from politics, music is
my main interest. This evening, after work, it was great to get stuck in to writing and
recording for my guest appearance on the forthcoming album from Leeds’ power
metal/New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal champions, Dream Troll. The track I’m