View of the World has been imitated without authorization in a variety of ways . The work has been imitated in postcard format by numerous municipalities , states and nations . Steinberg had stated that he could have retired on royalties from the many parodies made of the painting , had they been paid , a motivation for his eventual copyright lawsuit for the Moscow on the Hudson use . Fulford , writing in The National Post , noted that the metaphor of the world as a suburb of Manhattan was " understood and borrowed " by the whole world . Local artists , especially poster artists , presented similarly compelling depictions of their own provincial perceptions . Fulford demonstrated the prominence of this work by mentioning that a high school in suburban Ottawa made imitating View of the World an assignment in its graphic arts class . He also noted that the results of this assignment was a worldwide variety of global foci from which the students viewed the world .