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The Spanish fresco lady would like some money now

She's back.

The botched fresco. Photograph: Getty Images.
The botched fresco. Image: screenshot from youtube.

The Spanish fresco lady is back. She once painted a circle of hair round a 19th-century face of Jesus, and now she's completing a circle as old as time itself: sweetly idiosyncratic happening -> internet meme -> hard cash. 

According to @glynmoody on a blog at Techdirt.com (via @sinkdeep) she has recruited lawyers and is planning to claim copyright on her work, asking for a cut from the collection box that the church positioned under the fresco since it started taking off on the internet.

The picture became an instant internet hit after the eighty-year-old woman ineptly restored the 19th century fresco, with results that were described by the BBC's Europe correspondent as "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic". The attention soon recruited horde of visitors to the Spanish church, which has apparently been trying to cash in through its collection box. But that money belongs to the artist! She's taking it back.

8 comments

Pavlova's picture

Do you and the Guardian just swap story ideas each morning?

jankaas's picture

lol.
it certainly does have that can't be arsed approach to journalism doesn't it.

Ellie's picture

Work out her 'cut' and then fine her that amount of vandalism/destruction of property.

She may have meant no harm with the original work but she did end up ruining what was someone else's hard work. She should not be rewarded for that.

ben74688's picture

I think she should get paid for her creation. She should then have to pay it all back as rent to the owners of the fresco underneath :-)

Agent's picture

If she needs money maybe she could get a job as advisor to Nick Clegg or George Osbourne, she'd be a dab hand I reckon.

Captain Dirto's picture

Can vandalism be copyrighted? Destruction of property? What if I sprayed a picture in someone's house and they sold the story to a paper - would I be entitled to a cut of that money?

Frank Lankford's picture

I don't know the Spanish/EU copyright law, but a new derivative work based on an underlying copyrighted work can be copyrightable if it is sufficiently original. (Note that even translations of classics are copyrightable.)

Ironically, the more pathetically inept her restoration, the more of right in it she has.

K Rodgers's picture

Altering someone else's work does not create a new work, it creates a derivative. Does copyright law even apply?

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