Small countries have used this trick for ages. You can get Clint Eastwood stamps from Maldives. Gorillas in the Mist stamps from Lesotho. And Bermuda has a coin from the character of Netflix's The Queen.

And cute '25 cent' sized coins with pandas on them from North Korea.
Plus dollar sized coins with Elvis from the Marshall Islands

Stamp collecting is no joke in North Korea.

Lots of colourful issues. This anti- America issue stood out.
Colourful, almost comical, political art dominates many but not all issues.

TIL: Elizabeth II was a real life Disney Princess.

They SELL them as collectibles. They don’t USE them.

I've never really understood how you get from "I like Mickey Mouse" to "I will pay as much as I have to to own any object depicting Mickey Mouse."

[deleted]

That'll be 4 DALEKS.

#Niue of living

They’re legal tender, which is an important tax workaround. (Tl;dr for tax purposes, they are worth face value, rather than market value; this is not legal advice; consult a certified public accountant or financial attorney.)

There is absolutely no way any of these hit circulation.

But that destroys their value as collectibles! Oh, the humanity!

How do they get around the copyright laws?

So are my Canadian glow in the dark dinosaur coins. That doesn't mean I'm actually going to use them.

That last one honestly took me a second

It’s the crushing reality of the profit-driven, soulless world we live in. Defeated by the relentless pressure to succeed, some of us find solace in presenting our worth in Mickey Mouse memorabilia. Many think those mass-produced trophies of mediocre success will be their only legacy, but the rest of us know it will all end up in the trash to be forgotten. Much like the vast majority of humans who came before us.

I was hoping to find something along the lines of this here

If the government is issuing these coins they either don't care about that kind of copyright law or they don't have them.

Legal tender is legal tender. Whether an individual chooses to use it is up to them.

Disney and Nintendo do not fuck around when it comes to their IP.

Mister Deleted Comment seems to have had a difficult time distinguishing between the concepts of being a thing, and being used as a thing.

Your title specifically claims that the coins are used as legal tender, though, not that they simply are legal tender.

There's a difference between being a thing and being used as a thing.

Without paying legal right, I bet.

Wait for Disney's army to invade them...

I wonder which side a court in Niue would favour? Hmm...

Yeah, that's where it would happen.

I’ve been to Niue and they didn’t have this, they used the New Zealand dollar as their currency.

You're splitting hairs there mate

It's possible that they simply pay a Licence fee to Disney.

I just like collecting shit

What about people who are pedantic and also use their brain to be pedantic?

It would be funny if they were sued over copyright infringement only to be paid with the coins depicting the character they were sued over

If I don’t get to show off a metric ton of MM merch as my status symbol then what’s this all been about?!

They don't use these at all. They license the franchise to produce coins under their government name to private mints.

last I heard there were 20,000 Niuean people living in Auckland.

And 5,000 people living in Niue.

As opposed to hauling the government(all of them?) Into court in the US?

Damn! Claire Foy really has had a meteoric rise to fame, hasn't she?

Why would the US have jurisdiction as to what goes on in Niue?

I guess that depends on how you determine who counts as Niuean.

According to this article, the nations with the relatively biggest diasporas are the Guyanese (36.4 %) and the Bosnians (34 %).

https://www.statista.com/chart/4237/the-countries-with-the-most-people-living-overseas/