Statue of Liberty stamp mistake to cost $3.5M

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 USD 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 kilometres 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.