Hasta La Creative!

Four months after it began, the legal battle between GoldieBlox and the Beastie Boys appears to be winding down, as the band has agreed to drop its lawsuit against the toy maker over the unauthorized use of the song "Girls" in a commercial—in exchange for an apology and a donation to charity.

The apology, posted on the GoldieBlox website, reads:

We sincerely apologize for any negative impact our actions may have had on the Beastie Boys. We never intended to cast the band in a negative light and we regret putting them in a position to defend themselves when they had done nothing wrong.

As engineers and builders of intellectual property, we understand an artist's desire to have his or her work treated with respect. We should have reached out to the band before using their music in the video.

We know this is only one of the many mistakes we're bound to make as we grow our business. The great thing about mistakes is how much you can learn from them. As trying as this experience was, we have learned a valuable lesson. From now on, we will secure the proper rights and permissions in advance of any promotions, and we advise any other young company to do the same.

So, the company is claiming its actions were simply based on inexperience—which seems like a stretch considering how quickly GoldieBlox got the lawyers involved originally, but at least the apology is out there. The undisclosed revenue donation will go to a charity selected by the Beastie Boys that supports science, technology, engineering and mathematics education for girls—which the GoldieBlox products also promote.

The fight began after GoldieBlox featured a reworked version of the song in an empowering girl-power ad that went viral online in November. GoldieBlox preemptively filed a lawsuit hoping that the song would be ruled a fair-use parody. The Beastie Boys then countersued.

A little bit lost in all the legal wrangling, though in some ways the point of the whole mess, is one simple truth: music really can make or break an ad. The GoldieBlox commercial, "Princess Machine," soared with the "Girls" soundtrack, but became a shadow of itself with a different song.

GoldieBlox went from hero to zero in one short week, putting our ad-loving hearts through a roller coaster of emotions. Now, it's belatedly making amends by removing its parody of the Beastie Boys' "Girls" from its mega-popular "Princess Machine" ad—and posting its own "open letter" to the band (and the world) telling its side of the story.

To recap: GoldieBlox last week released an empowering spot using a rewritten version "Girls" as the soundtrack to breaking gender roles in the toy space. (Sample lyrics: "It's time to change/We deserve to see a range/'Cause all our toys look just the same/And we would like to use our brains.") The ad was clever and cool, and everyone loved it—except they failed to ask the Beastie Boys for permission to use the song. The band objected, and GoldieBlox sued to have its soundtrack declared fair use. That precipitated a PR nightmare (especially after the Beasties' posted a frankly damning open letter in response). So now, GoldieBlox has surrendered—deleting the video, posting a new one with a more generic soundtrack and releasing its own lengthy statement about the affair.

"We don't want to fight with you. We love you and we are actually huge fans," GoldieBlox founder Debra Sterling writes. She goes on to defend her intentions but says "our hearts sank last week when your lawyers called us with threats." Sterling says she had no idea the late Adam Yauch was opposed to using his music in ads (not every "huge fan" of Yauch's knows this, apparently, even one who is looking into doing just that), and adds: "We don't want to spend our time fighting legal battles. We want to inspire the next generation. We want to be good role models. And we want to be your friends."

It's basically a passive-aggressive non-apology, casting the Beastie Boys as bullies and GoldieBlox as the victim—and also, irritatingly, the bigger person. The company suddenly doesn't want to fight a legal battle, even though it started one. And it wants to be friends, even though it's spent a week trying to be enemies.

Perhaps this bitterness is understandable. The company had a huge hit on its hands—deleting it must be tough to swallow. And the new spot (posted below), without the Beastie Boys song, definitely has less energy—although maybe it just seems that way because most of us are sort of over it.

The surviving members of the hip-hop group have signed a deal with Spiegel & Grau for a characteristically eclectic book, with a planned fall 2015 release.