Today in 2010, the US Postal Service released a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty… well, sort of.
And that “sort of” ended up being a big and expensive deal.
The Postal Service has put out lots and lots and lots of different stamps, and lots and lots and lots of those stamps feature patriotic images.
Lots of flags, lots of veterans, and lots of images of the Statue of Liberty.
In 2010, the service did what it often does: officials decided it was time for a Statue of Liberty stamp, the designers chose a photo from a set of stock images, they added the photo to the stamp layout, and they sent the design off to print billions and billions of stamps.
Except that the image they chose was not the Statue of Liberty.
It was a replica Statue of Liberty that stood outside a casino in Las Vegas.
To be fair, the real statue and the replica are very similar.
It was a stamp collector who wrote in to Linn’s Stamp News to say that if you looked closely at the facial features on the stamp, they were just a bit different than the features on the actual Statue of Liberty.
It’s perfectly fine to use stock images of the Statue of Liberty on stamps, but a replica Statue of Liberty with its own facial features is a whole different story.
The artist who created the Las Vegas statue, Robert S. Davidson, went to court.
He said the Postal Service had infringed on his copyright by printing stamps that featured his creation without his permission.
The Postal Service argued the replica statue was so similar that it didn’t qualify for copyright protection.
But in 2018, a federal court ruled for the artist, and ordered that he be paid $3,554,946.95… an amount of money that could buy a lot of stamps.
Most Fridays I go grocery shopping, and almost every week there’s a moment where I try to remember whether we’re out of a certain item in the fridge or whether we still have some.
A new device called The Super Smart Fridge could solve my problem!
It puts a camera inside the refrigerator and an app on your smart phone so that you can check from anywhere to see whether you’ve finished off the ketchup or you need a new bottle.
Which reminds me, I need to pick up more ketchup this week.
GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME TRIPLE SEVENS (Now I Know)
Statue of Liberty (Linn’s Stamp News)
Rocco’s The Super Smart Fridge Lets You Check What You Already Have, Remotely (Cool Hunting)