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How the "Statue of Liberty" cost the US Postal Service over 3 million dollars by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 09/17/2018, 9:32am PDT
The United States Postal Service issues lots of stamps. They have to; the Postal Service no longer gets subsidies and has to cover the cost of delivering mail from the sale of postage and other items. A big part of the Postal Service's revenue is Philatelic sales, the sales of stamps to stamp collectors. This is Big Business; as much as 40% of every stamp issue is bought by collectors. This is pure profit as these stamps are never used for delivering mail.

So the Postal Service issues lots of new stamps. One they decided to do was a Statue of Liberty ForeverĀ® stamp. This used the head and face of the statue. Well, the Postal Service doesn't just send someone to the Statue of Liberty to take pictures. No, they simply purchase a license from a stock photo company for whatever image they're using. In this case they found a nice image and paid US$1,500.00 for an unlimited license for all the stamps they would produce.

Only problem was the picture wasn't of the Statue of Liberty, it was of the replica of the Statue which is located at the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas. Which does not look the same as the original Statue.

Had someone noticed this earlier than when they did the Postal Service could have done some things to reduce the potential damages. They found out when the sculptor sued them. Now, the Postal Service, as a part of the government, has Sovereign Immunity and can't be sued unless it consents to the suit. Well, Congress has granted cosent to sue the government for copyright infringement.

As it turned out, the sculptor never bothered registering his copyright on his version of the statue, so when he did register in order to sue, it was more than 3 months after the infringement occurred so he could not get "statutory damages" but only actual damages.

The court found the maximum the Postal Service normally paid for a reproduction license was $5,000, plus another $30,000 for non-stamp swag that is sold with the image such as coffee mugs and large reproductions. This covered stamps people actually used to mail things. But on the unused stamps - which includes those that will never be used because they're kept by stamp collectors - the court decided on a 5% royalty. This stamp had sold millions of copies, so the 5% royalty amounted to 3.1 million dollars.

And that's what the Postal Service ended up having to pay, over $3.2 million after interest and attorney's fees.
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How the "Statue of Liberty" cost the US Postal Service over 3 million dollars by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 09/17/2018, 9:32am PDT NEW
 
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