A lawsuit over how much Andy Warhol “transformed” Lynn Goldsmith’s photographs of Prince may change how courts look at art.
via Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/769275/supreme-court-hears-arguments-in-andy-warhol-copyright-case/To make the image, Warhol was sent a portrait of Prince made a few years earlier by a photographer named Lynn Goldsmith
In a copyright case, the Justices revealed their own anxieties about interpreting precedents.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-supreme-courts-self-conscious-take-on-andy-warholWhether the Prince Series is fair use turns on whether Warhol “transformed” the photo on which he relied—and the answer to that turns on what exactly “transformative” means
The ultimate verdict will have major ramifications on fair use in the visual arts.
via PetaPixel: https://petapixel.com/2022/03/28/u-s-supreme-court-to-hear-critical-fair-use-case-over-warhol-photo/Lynn Goldsmith is a famed photographer who is also a long-time American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) member. In 1984 Vanity Fair licensed one of Goldsmith’s photos of Prince that was shot in December of 1981 for $400 to create an illustration of Prince to be used in an article “Purple Fame.” Vanity Fair did not inform Goldsmith that the photo was being used by Warhol as a reference, and she did not see the article when it was initially published.
Lynn Goldsmith’s Victory Against the Warhol Foundation is Huge for Photographers
Upon Prince’s death in 2016, the Warhol Foundation licensed the Prince Series for use in a Condé Nast tribute magazine, and one of the images was used on the cover. Goldsmith tried to extract a licensing fee, but the Foundation accused her of a “shake down” and filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in 2017. The suit sought a “declaratory judgment” that Warhol’s images didn’t infringe upon Goldsmith’s copyright and were “transformative or are otherwise protected by fair use.” Goldsmith countersued for infringement.
A U.S. appeals court has ruled in favor of photographer Lynn Goldsmith in her copyright dispute over how Andy Warhol had used her portrait photo of Prince.
Photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s studio says the Smithsonian Institution violated copyright of her 1993 portrait of Prince last week by distributing the image to the media without permission
