from the under-the-“c” dept
Last year, we discussed two insane rulings coming out of Denmark stating that a newspaper’s depiction of a statue of The Little Mermaid in cartoon form was somehow copyright infringement. If you’re not familiar with the case, you may be surprised to learn that this is not Disney being Disney. Instead, it is the estate of Edvard Eriksen, creator of Denmark’s bronzed statue of the character from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, which annoyingly polices anything remotely like the statue should it pop up elsewhere. In this case, the paper, Berlingske, depicted the statue in a cartoon as a zombie, and also in a photograph wearing a COVID mask. Erikson’s estate sued and, as mentioned, both won its initial trial and then won again on appeal.
Given how flatly insane all of that is, the paper of course appealed the ruling all the way up to Denmark’s Supreme Court. Where, finally, sanity has been restored. The court there overruled the previous two courts and ruled that the use by the paper was not copyright infringement.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court said “that neither the caricature drawing nor the photograph of The Little Mermaid with a mask on, which was brought to Berlingske in connection with newspaper articles, infringed the copyright of the heirs to the sculpture The Little Mermaid.”
The daily’s chief editor, Tom Jensen, had argued that the paper had used the image of The Little Mermaid for noncommercial purposes.
“It would have been a problem for the freedom of the media to do what we were created to do — namely to run a journalistic business, including satirical cartoons — if we had been convicted,” Jensen said.
There isn’t a great deal more to say about this, other than to celebrate this court finally getting it right on this question. Jensen is precisely correct: if media companies couldn’t take photographs that include works that have any sort of copyright protection, they largely wouldn’t be able to take any photographs at all. If they could likewise not create cartoons as commentary depicting famous works of art within the community, that would limit the press’ freedom of expression.
None of this is hard to figure out, other than just how two separate courts got this so wrong. Imagine an America, for instance, in which this editorial cartoon from The North State Journal, showing the Statue of Liberty removing a medical mask, could not be published
Like that cartoon or not, I assure you that you want a country where newspapers are free to publish that cartoon without having to worry about being sued for copyright infringement on a statue. And, yes, the example is imperfect, as the Statue of Liberty doesn’t currently enjoy copyright protections, but you get the point.
And so the mermaid is free once more, no longer bound by the laws of her bipedal captors.
Filed Under: copyright, denmark, edvard eriksen, little mermaid, statues
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