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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the article it points out that a foreign toy company was successfully sued for making a puzzle from Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. I'm curious what enforcement authority the Italians have over a German company, if any. The court ruling is effectively saying that the historical IP of the Italian peninsula belongs to whichever Italian museum happens to have the original artifact in their possession, but would a German or EU court uphold this?

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Someone posted this elsewhere in the thread. It looks like last month a German court said Italy can't actually do that because EU copyright is standardized at life + 70. The Italian government says they'll challenge the ruling, but I'm having a hard time imagining any court in the EU siding with Italy on this one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240410141158/https://www.nytim...

Italian peninsula?

Also it’s not conincidental that David is in La Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.

It was moved there from its highly symbolic place at the Piazza della Signoria in part due to political implications.

I'm not sure this answered the question. The company is based in Germany. Can they not just ignore the Italian ruling, since they're not in Italy?

Not necessarily, i'm not an expert in EU law, but being in the EU they may be forced to recognize the italian ruling, according to the Brussel I Regulation [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_I_Regulation_2012

Normally it would be courts of wherever the defendant lives deciding the issue:

“European Union (EU) law determines which courts of which Member States should hear the case, to avoid conflicting decisions. The general rule is that a person should be sued in the State where s/he is domiciled. Furthermore, other jurisdictional rules may be invoked as alternative in specific cases, for example, the person failing in performance of the contract can be sued at the place of performance of the obligation in question (e.g., in the place where the purchased goods should have been delivered). Special rules exist to protect groups such as consumers, workers and insured persons.”

https://e-justice.europa.eu/85/EN/which_country_s_court_is_r...

So seemingly Italian courts shouldn’t have jurisdiction.

Answering the question wasn’t really an objective. More a response to the incredulity and the fact I inferred the commenter believed the museum’s ownership of Michelangelo’s David is not much more than a coincidence.

Didn't someone post recently that they had created a working version of one of Da Vinci's engines? I think it was a clockwork cart.

In fact, I believe that it was a commercial product.

How would that be treated?

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