SCOTUS: Andy Warholin teos loukkasi alkuperäisen valokuvan ottaneen tekijänoikeutta

The “purpose and character” of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s particular commercial use of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph does not favor AWF’s “fair use” defense to copyright infringement.

In 2016, petitioner Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. (AWF) licensed to Condé Nast for $10,000 an image of “Orange Prince”—an orange silkscreen portrait of the musician Prince created by pop artist Andy Warhol—to appear on the cover of a magazine com- memorating Prince. Orange Prince is one of 16 works now known as the Prince Series that Warhol derived from a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by respondent Lynn Goldsmith, a professional photog- rapher. Goldsmith had been commissioned by Newsweek in 1981 to photograph a then “up and coming” musician named Prince Rogers Nelson, after which Newsweek published one of Goldsmith’s photos along with an article about Prince. Years later, Goldsmith granted a limited license to Vanity Fair for use of one of her Prince photos as an “artist reference for an illustration.” The terms of the license included that the use would be for “one time” only. Vanity Fair hired Warhol to create the illustration, and Warhol used Goldsmith’s photo to create a purple silkscreen portrait of Prince, which appeared with an article about Prince in Vanity Fair’s November 1984 issue. The magazine credited Goldsmith for the “source photograph” and paid her $400.

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