[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-476346410.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tArtist Jeff Koons has once again prevailed in a legal challenge, as a New York federal appeals court affirmed that a copyright lawsuit filed against him by artist Michael Hayden was brought too late.<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to court documents filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit was dismissed for the second time on procedural grounds: Hayden waited until 2021 to file suit, which sought to assert copyright over a set piece Hayden had created that appears in a 1989 photograph from Koons\u2019s notorious \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d series, which also included oil paintings and a billboard. The case centered on a Styrofoam sculpture of a coiled serpent created by Hayden for the Italian adult film star Ilona Staller (aka Cicciolina), then Koons\u2019s collaborator (and later, wife). <\/p>\n
\n\tHayden registered the sculpture with the US Copyright Office in 2019, reportedly the year he learned of its appearance in the series, and sued Koons in 2021. The panel of three judges dismissed the case, writing in their opinion that the decision should not be taken to mean that Koons\u2019s use of the sculpture did not constitute copyright infringement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe court found that Hayden had ample opportunity to discover the alleged infringement before the three-year statute of limitations had passed, given that he had lived in Italy for decades and was fluent in Italian. \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d had made a controversial splash in the public eye and was widely covered in the Italian press, and the series has become a defining body of work in the famous artist\u2019s oeuvre.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWe do not expect a reasonable copyright holder to scour the news, comb through the internet, or keep apprised of pop culture,\u201d wrote Judge Denny Chin, who penned the decision for the panel. But, he added, \u201cthe discovery rule does not allow plaintiffs to bury their heads in the sand, ignore widespread international media coverage of allegedly infringing art, and then sue for potential infringement some thirty years later.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHayden argued his claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to knowingly remove or alter information identifying a copyright owner to aid copyright infringement. The district court rejected the argument, ruling that Hayden\u2019s underlying copyright claim was filed too late. <\/p>\n
\n\tOn appeal, Hayden also argued that the DMCA claim was independently valid because \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d works were published more recently on Koons\u2019s website. But the Second Circuit declined to consider that argument, finding it underdeveloped and irrelevant to the statute of limitations for such claims.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe ruling is the latest in a decades-spanning history of copyright disputes surrounding Koons\u2019s appropriation-based practice\u2014not all of which have settled in his favor. In 2021, France\u2019s highest court upheld a ruling that Koons\u2019s 1988 sculpture Fait d\u2019hiver<\/em>, based on a 1985 advertisement by photographer Franck Davidovici, infringed the photographer\u2019s copyright. The work was exhibited at the 2011 Venice Biennale and reproduced in the catalog for Koons\u2019s 2014 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where Davidovici said he first discovered its existence.<\/p>\n \n\tThe court ordered Koons; his company, Jeff Koons LLC; the Pompidou; and a book publisher to pay Davidovici $170,000 in damages. Koons\u2019s company was also ordered to pay $12,500 for reproducing an image from the artist\u2019s website, while the publisher was ordered to pay $2,300 for selling a book containing images of the work.<\/p>\n ARTnews<\/em> has contacted representatives for Jeff Koons and Michael Hayden.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/jeff-koons-made-in-heaven-series-lawsuit-appeal-win-1234793187\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-476346410.jpg?w=1024″] Artist Jeff Koons has once again prevailed in a legal challenge, as a New York federal appeals court affirmed that a copyright lawsuit filed against him by artist Michael Hayden was brought too late. According to court documents filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2058894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2058894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2058894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2058894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2058894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}