On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, arrived in New York Harbor. These days it would seem more like a gift from Ikea than France, the statue was in 350 pieces in more than 200 boxes.

The Statute of Liberty was patented by the sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, six years earlier in 1879:

A peculiar IP side story is that in 2018 the U.S. Postal Services was ordered to pay artist Robert Davidson $3,554,946.95 for accidentally basing its 2011 Forever Stamp honoring the Statute of Liberty, not on the real Statue of Liberty, but on a stylized recreation Davidson produced for the New York-New York Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

The postal service sold more than 4,948,761,166 stamps with the unintentionally infringing image. The Court concluded that there were sufficient differences between the New York and Vegas statues to support a copyright claim.