New York: A 2010 US Postal Service stamp mistakenly bearing the image of a Lady Liberty replica will cost the American post office a whopping USD 3.5 million for the copyright violation, according to a media report.
In a 2010 stamp design, the United States Postal Service mistook a Las Vegas-based replica for the real Statue of Liberty. Now a federal court has ruled that the post office must pay the replica’s sculptor $ 3.5 million for violating his copyright, ‘The New York Times’ reported.
The statue by the artist Robert Davidson sits at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas, thousands of km away from the mint-green figure in New York Harbour.
Yet an image of his sculpture made a surprise appearance on the post office’s Lady Liberty “forever” stamp in 2010.
Davidson filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the post office in 2013, claiming it illegally used the image of his piece, and a federal court agreed, awarding him damages after he established that his piece was different enough from the original to be protected, the report said.
Made of plaster mud, acrylic-based coating and foam, the replica is half the size of the real Statue of Liberty and sports more defined eyes and lips.
Davidson argued in court that his mother-in-law’s face inspired the Las Vegas sculpture’s design. He said he made the statue’s appearance a little more modern, a little more feminine than the original’s ‘masculine’ features.
The post office had originally picked the photo by searching Getty Images, the stock-photo agency, and believed it showed the real statue. After sizing and cropping the photo to fit on a stamp, the post office released it to the public in December 2010.
The post office, however, declined to comment on the case’s outcome, the report said.