Max Verstappen, Picnic back in court over parody ad

The court in The Hague will reconsider a dispute between Max Verstappen and the online supermarket Picnic. The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a previous ruling by the court in Amsterdam that the company did not have to pay 150,000 to Verstappen for an ad campaign featuring a lookalike of the racing driver cannot be upheld.

According to the Supreme Court, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal wrongly ruled that the lookalike has nothing to do with portrait rights under copyright law. The video, posted on Facebook in 2016, shows a Verstappen lookalike walking past a Jumbo car and getting into a Picnic delivery van. The ad appeared a day after supermarket chain Jumbo, sponsor of the F1 driver, released a commercial with Verstappen.

The court in Amsterdam ruled in 2018 that Verstappen's portrait rights outweigh Picnic's right to free expression and awarded the driver his claim. That judgment was overturned on appeal two years later. According to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal, Picnic made sufficiently clear that it was a Verstappen lookalike and not Verstappen himself.

Picnic said that the Facebook video was intended to be funny and only to motivate staff. They took the video offline as soon as they heard that Verstappen did not like it.