U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against Warhol Estate in Copyright Battle Over Prince Artwork

U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against Warhol Estate in Copyright Battle Over Prince Artwork

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against Andy Warhol’s Estate in a copyright lawsuit in connection with celebrity photographer Lynn Goldsmith as the Justices faulted the famed pop artist’s use of her photo of the singer Prince in a silkscreen series depicting the charismatic rock star.

The Justices, in 7:2 ruling authored by the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, upheld a Lower Court’s ruling that Warhol’s works based on Goldsmith’s 1981 photo were not immune from her copyright infringement lawsuit.

The case has been proved to be landmark ruling in the art world and entertainment industry for its implications regarding the legal doctrine called ‘fair use’, which promotes freedom of expression by allowing the use of copyright-protected works under certain circumstances without the owner’s permission.

The renowned artist Warhol, died in 1987. Popular for his creation of silkscreen print paintings and other revered and financially valuable works inspired by photos of celebrities including the actor Marilyn Monroe, the singer Elvis Presley, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and the boxer Muhammad Ali.

The issue tangled in the litigation involving Goldsmith was Warhol’s Orange Prince series.

Vanity Fair magazine had commissioned Warhol to make an image of Prince to be published accompanying a story about the rocker, giving credit to Goldsmith for the source photograph.

Warhol created 14 silkscreens and two pencil illustrations based on the photo Goldsmith had taken of Prince for Newsweek magazine in 1981, most of which were not authorized by the photographer.

Goldsmith alleged that she learned regarding the unauthorized works only after Prince’s 2016 death. She countersued the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2017 after it asked a Court to find that the works did not violate her copyright.

The question of whether the new work has a ‘transformative’ function, such as parody, education, or critique, has been a major consideration for Courts while determining the legal aspect of fair use.

The Supreme Court focused on the specific use that allegedly infringed Goldsmith’s copyright- a license of Warhol’s work to Condé Nast and said that it was not transformative because it served the same commercial purpose as Goldsmith’s photo: to depict Prince in a magazine.

Sotomayor discerned that use from Warhol’s pop art, like his famed prints of Campbell’s soup cans. “The Soup Cans series uses Campbell’s copyrighted work for an artistic commentary on consumerism, a purpose that is orthogonal to advertising soup,” Sotomayor wrote.

The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned a judge's ruling that Warhol made fair use of Goldsmith's photo by transforming her depiction of a ‘vulnerable’ musician into a ‘larger-than-life’ figure.

The 2nd Circuit decided that judges should not ‘assume the role of art critic’ by considering its meaning, but instead decide whether the new work has a different artistic purpose and character from the old one. Under that standard, the 2nd Circuit said, Warhol’s paintings were closer to adapting Goldsmith's photo in a different medium than transforming it.

Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal judge, wrote a dissenting opinion joined by the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, arguing for the artistic value of appropriation with nods to artists ranging from the playwright William Shakespeare to the painter Edouard Manet to the rock musician Nick Cave.

Kagan wrote, “All that matters is that Warhol and the publisher entered into a licensing transaction, similar to one Goldsmith might have done. Because the artist had such a commercial purpose, all the creativity in the world could not save him…. In declining to acknowledge the importance of transformative copying, the court today, and for the first time, turns its back on how creativity works.”