An Amsterdam art student does not have to pay €200,000 to luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton for using an image of one of its bags in a painting, a court in The Hague ruled on Wednesday.

Nadia Plesner, who attends the Rietveld academy, was ordered earlier this year to pay €5,000 a day to the company for infringing copyright by a lower court.
The bag is seen carried by a small African boy in her painting Dafurnica, based on Picasso’s Guernica, and aimed at drawing attention to the humanitarian disaster in the Western Sudan region of Darfur.
The court ruled on Wednesday that Plesner’s right to freedom of expression through her work weighed more heavily than Louis Vuitton’s right to protect its property. The use of the bag in the painting is both functional and in proportion, the court said.