Trademark case: Kerson v. Vermont Law School, Inc., USA

The murals were merely hidden from public view, not modified or destroyed.

A law school that covered up two controversial murals with acoustic panels in order to hide them from public view did not violate the rights of the visual artist who created the murals, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has held. The court, in affirming the judgment of a district court in Vermont, relied largely on the plain meaning of the visual arts statute to find that the obscuring of the two murals did not equate to their unauthorized “destruction” or “modification” (Kerson v. Vermont Law School, Inc., August 18, 2023, Livingston, D.).

Case date: 18 August 2023

Case number: No. 21-2904

Court: United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit

A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.