Yesterday morning the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited
ruling in one of the most closely-watched copyright cases in a long
time – Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith. This case
raised the question of whether pop artist Andy Warhol's
silkscreen painting of rock star Prince infringed on a photograph
of Prince on which it was based, or was instead a Fair Use under
Copyright law because it was "transformative" of the
original. In a ruling that was frankly a surprise to me at first,
the Court found no Fair Use, and in the process provided some
important clarification to the "transformative use" prong
of the Fair Use analysis.
There is a lot to unpack in the Court's 87-page opinion,
which includes a separate concurrence and a dissent. I look forward
to digging in more in the future – particularly about how
this ruling will impact various creative industries (and inform
further thinking about copyright and AI-generated content), but I
think there are some valuable
