A Chicago-based auction house has sold the rights to some of Jimi Hendrix's most famous songs to a private bidder for $15 million - but the late guitarist´s estate has vowed to prove that it, and not the vendor, owns the rights to the songs.
The songs - which include Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile and Foxy Lady - were auctioned by the estate of Michael Frank Jeffery, Hendrix´s one-time manager who died in a plane crash in 1973.
But Experience Hendrix, the late guitarist´s family-run estate, believes it owns the rights to all of Hendrix´s compositions and recordings. Bob Merlis, a spokesman for Experience Hendrix, told Reuters, "Whoever bought this bought themselves the right to be a litigant. It will be contested instantly."
The legal haze is likely to continue for some time; if you can stomach the legalese, press releases on the Experience Hendrix site delineate its legal position extremely meticulously. Suffice to say that either the Hendrix estate doesn´t know what it legally owns, or someone has just taken a 15-million-dollar gamble....
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