Supreme Court Hears Warhol Case That Could End Fair Use as We Know It

upstart writes:

The Court wrestled with who gets to decide the meaning of art:

In 1981 the photographer Lynn Goldsmith took a portrait of Prince. He sits alone on a white background, wearing a blank expression with a glint of light in his eyes. In 1984 Andy Warhol used that photo to create art. Warhol altered the image, adjusting the angle of Prince's face, layering on swaths of color, darkening the edges, and adding hand-drawn outlines and other details in a series of 16 silkscreen prints.

40 years later, the artwork is at the center of a Supreme Court case that could change the course of American art, copyright law, and even the state of the internet. The question is whether Warhol's work was fair use, or if he violated Goldsmith's copyright. In oral arguments on Wednesday, the Court wrestled with the finer points of the issue, and to put it mildly, it's pretty complicated.

Did Warhol create an entirely new work of art, or was it just a derivative reinterpretation of Goldsmith's photo? If the art is found to be derivative, the Warhol Foundation will owe Goldsmith millions in fees, royalties, and perhaps additional damages. But the implications of the Supreme Court's impending decision are a much bigger deal than a few million dollars.

[...] You don't have to pay the original artist if it's fair use, which is determined based on four factors: the purpose you're using it for, the nature of the art, how substantially you used the original work, and how your new art affects the market for the original. The lawyers, in this case, focused on the first and fourth factors, purpose and the market.

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