EU overrules Salvador Dalí's decision to bequeath copyright

Salvador Dalí would find it surreal - EU rules allow national governments and not artists themselves to decide who gets their royalties after death.

The painter died in 1989, widower and childless he named the Spanish state as the sole beneficiary of his intellectual property rights.

Those rights were managed by a Spanish foundation he set up himself to promote and defend Dalí's "cultural and intellectual oeuvre... his life experience, his thoughts, his projects and ideas... and the universal recognition of the genius of his contribution to the Fine Arts".

The foundation later gave a Spanish society an exclusive worldwide mandate to manage Dalí's copyright - including in France where national legislation only allows an artist's heirs to benefit from resale rights. Such rights cannot be bequeathed to third parties - such as the Spanish state - by the artist's will.

Instead the French collecting agency found five Dalí family members and made them heirs - giving them resale rights income the Spanish foundation expected to receive as its own.

The foundation sued through French courts for non-payment - but now the European Court of Justice has ruled that "Member states may make their own legislative choice in determining the categories of persons capable of benefiting from the resale right after the death of the author of a work of art."

The ruling went on: "While the European Union legislature wanted those entitled under the author to benefit fully from the resale right after the death of that author, it nevertheless left to each member state, the task of defining the persons capable of being categorised as those entitled under their national law."