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Post Office Owes $3.5 Million For Using Wrong Statue of Liberty On a Stamp (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A sculptor who created a replica of the Statue of Liberty for a Las Vegas casino was awarded $3.5 million in damages last week after the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) accidentally used a photo of his statue -- rather than a photo of the original statue in New York harbor -- on one of its most common stamps. If you bought a "forever" stamp between 2011 and 2014, there's a good chance that it showed the face of the Statue of Liberty replica that sculptor Robert Davidson constructed for the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The Post Office licensed a photo of Davidson's statue from the image service Getty for $1,500, initially believing it was a photograph of the original statue. (The license only covered the rights to Getty's photograph of the statue -- not the statue itself.)
The stamp with the resulting image was released to the public in December 2010; it took four months before anyone pointed out the mistake to the Post Office. In March 2011, a spokesperson said that the USPS "still loves the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." The Post Office continued using the photo for almost three years before retiring it in January 2014. The court reportedly awarded Davidson a five percent royalty for $70 million worth of unused stamps; it also awarded him $5,000 in damages for the nearly $5 billion worth of stamps that were used to pay postage. The total damages amounted to $3.55 million.
The stamp with the resulting image was released to the public in December 2010; it took four months before anyone pointed out the mistake to the Post Office. In March 2011, a spokesperson said that the USPS "still loves the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." The Post Office continued using the photo for almost three years before retiring it in January 2014. The court reportedly awarded Davidson a five percent royalty for $70 million worth of unused stamps; it also awarded him $5,000 in damages for the nearly $5 billion worth of stamps that were used to pay postage. The total damages amounted to $3.55 million.
Getty should be refunding the $1500,
Getty should be paying the entire judgement, since they falsely represented that they had the rights to sell, and the US Government accepted that claim in good faith. But...
because the stamp was not sold for the picture but a SERVICE
We just saw the story on a Virginia court that ruled that a for-profit group (a Virginia Film Festival) could use a photographer's image as part of its advertising ("come to our festival and you can also do these local things...") under "fair use" exemptions. The Post Office is not a for-profit corporation, and the picture of the statue is not what was being purchased, as you point out. Neither the owner of the photograph nor the owner of the statue were fiscally injured in this process, so they deserve no punitive damages, nor do they deserve royalties from the USPS.