NO COPYING THE QUEEN
The Strange Legal Warning on British Money
If you happen to have a £5 note on you, take it out for a moment. (If not, you can easily find pictures on the Bank of England’s website.) Since September 2016, £5 notes have featured Queen Elizabeth II on one side and Winston Churchill on the other. And below Churchill, in the bottom left corner, you’ll see a copyright notice. Specifically, it reads: “© The Governor and Company of the Bank of England,” followed by the print year.
This may seem extraordinarily unnecessary—if you make near-perfect replicas of real notes, it’s called counterfeiting, and it’s illegal. So why does British currency also need a copyright warning?
Well, people were accepting bills that were obviously fake in lieu of real currency. Why? Because it was art.
In 1984, an artist now known as J.S.G. Boggs was in a diner in Chicago enjoying a cup of coffee with a doughnut. He began to doodle on a napkin. As The New York Times explained, “he started with the numeral 1, then transformed it into the image of a dollar bill.” This caught the eye of his waitress who wanted to buy it off him, but he declined. Instead, the two came up with a seemingly silly idea: She’d accept it as payment for his ninety-cent meal. She even gave him ten cents back as change.
For the rest of his life, Boggs tried to repeat this type of exchange. Instead of actual money, he’d offer up a hand-drawn, high-quality image of one side of a piece of currency. And every so often, he’d find someone who said yes. The denominations and even the issuing nations would change—he’d draw the right amount of money to cover the tab and use currency appropriate for where he was. He’d sign each note, sometimes making himself the Secretary of the Treasury. Over time, these little works became known as “Boggs notes” in the art world, and collectors would buy them for well above their face value. Boggs never sold them directly to dealers, though, instead continuing to use them in commerce. He’d then sell the receipt and change—and the info as to where he used the Boggs note—to collectors and galleries. At some point in the late 1990s, a collector bought just one Boggs bill for $420,000. By 1999, The Economist reported, “his drawings had paid for more than $1m-worth of goods, including rent, clothes, hotels and a brand-new Yamaha motorbike.” His fake money was a win-win for everyone involved!
But not everyone was pleased with his efforts. At a certain point, even a hand-drawn, one-sided bill is a counterfeit, right? That’s what the United Kingdom believed, at least. In 1986, as he set up for a gallery showing in London, Boggs was arrested. As the Times recounts, “three constables raided the gallery and hauled Mr. Boggs off to jail. He was charged with four counts of violating the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act.” He hired a civil rights lawyer named Geoffrey Robertson who argued that no, this wasn’t illegal. Again, they were hand-drawn, one-sided, and now obviously art—and the UK courts agreed.
The government gave up on charging Boggs, but not before it protected itself from similar problems in the future. If counterfeiting wasn’t a viable legal “gotcha,” there was another one: copyright. As Robertson would later explain, the UK added the copyright notice to their notes in response to Boggs’s victory in the counterfeiting case.