New York via Vegas:
The Postal Service has to pay $3.5 million after using the wrong Lady Liberty on a stamp.
They sounded like one of those perfect romantic odd couples at first — the kind you can’t understand how they even hooked up, but they seem so great for each other. The U.S. Postal Service and a half-size replica of the Statue of Liberty — from a Las Vegas hotel, no less.
They met totally by accident. The Postal Service thought she was the real statue and put her picture on one of its most popular stamps. It was like the premise of a rom-com. But the best part was, postal officials wanted to stay with the image even after realizing the mistake.
“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” a Postal Service spokesman told The New York Times in 2011. And USPS went on to feature the Las Vegas knockoff’s sultry lips and retro-modern bangs on billions of stamps for years to come.
“Forever” stamps, USPS called them. As in happily ever after.
But that was before the breakup, and the court fight, and before all the ugly details became public.
And now it’s over. Last week, a federal judge ordered USPS to pay the statue’s creator $3.5 million for exploiting the sculpture without permission or consent.
So much for love stories. When things started to go bad, some people blamed the statue.
More exactly, they blamed the artist, Robert S. Davidson. He sued for copyright infringement in 2013, claiming USPS had sold billions of the stamps, even after the government realized it had confused an image of his plaster sculpture at the New York-new York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for the 19th-century stone-and-copper behemoth off the shore of the real New York.