Have Marlboro 'Ripped Off' The Temper Trap To Sell Smoking To Germans?

The manufacturer of global tobacco conglomerate Marlboro has found itself in hot water this week after several claims of plagiarism — one coming from The Temper Trap camp — emerged against a 2012 advertising campaign in Germany that found renewed attention after being included on John Oliver's weekly current affairs/satire program Last Week Tonight.

The Temper Trap's (main) issue with the advertising campaign comes as a result of its soundtrack, which — objectively — runs pretty darn similar to, and in some parts indistinguishably from, TTT's hit 2009 single Sweet Disposition, an unauthorised appropriation by, and association with, tobacco giant Philip Morris International that the band have said they are "disgusted" by and labelled nothing short of a "blatant rip-off".

"This usage was not approved by anyone from the band, management, record labels or publishers," band management said in an issued statement. "We are disgusted by this blatant rip-off of the band's music and it's currently in the hands of our legal team."

Ignoring the morally questionable stance of Marlboro's campaign — which was eventually banned even in Germany within a matter of months for its explicit focus on young people and the way that smoking presumably makes them want to engage in extreme sports or whatever — it's attracted further criticism from the filmmaking community after it was discovered that a good deal of footage used in the ad had been lifted from an Australian short film commissioned for local business STA Travel, with the director, Rick Mereki, tweeting that he, too, had only become of Marlboro's unauthorised use of his content once the video was aired on Last Week Tonight.

If you're old enough and smart enough to not be influenced by flashy effects and thinly veiled approximations of hit songs, you can watch the campaign here, or, better yet, watch Oliver tear it to shreds as part of his general takedown of the tobacco industry.