Michigan State University has reached a settlement with the creator of a quiz series that featured a question about Adolf Hitler on Spartan Stadium’s scoreboard on October 2023, an incident that sparked public backlash and led to a lawsuit against the university.
The settlement comes two years after the incident, which occurred shortly before MSU’s football game against the University of Michigan, when a trivia question about Adolf Hitler, accompanied by his image, was displayed on the stadium’s scoreboard.
Shortly after the incident took place, the MSU Board of Trustees, then Athletics Director Alan Haller and Interim President Teresa Woodruff issued an apology to the community.
Floris van Pallandt, the owner of operator of Netherlands-based Carsilius Media and the operator of the YouTube channel that posted the quiz, filed the initial lawsuit against the university in August of 2024, seeking at least $150,000 in damages. Van Pallandt settled with the university for $30,000.
According to Jeremy Kennedy, the lawyer representing van Pallandt, the reason the initial demand for $150,000 was brought down was due to many U.S. protections of intellectual property rights not being “triggered” for van Pallandt, who is from the Netherlands.
“We think it is a fair settlement,” Kennedy told The State News. “Michigan State doesn’t admit any liability in the settlement — which is their right — but my client had his intellectual property used without his permission in a very public setting and it resulted in a pretty significant backlash that was extremely harmful to him.”
Van Pallandt sued MSU’s Board of Trustees for copyright infringement and an invasion of privacy which placed him in a “false light” to the public. The timing of the incident occurred a week after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, sparking “an extremely high degree of attention, most of it negative,” according to the lawsuit.
Kennedy said the settlement also recognizes that the university is paying van Pallandt for the unauthorized usage of “five different quizzes” he has created.
