The justices will decide whether the artist’s reliance on a photograph of the musician was copyright infringement or protected as a new, transformative work.
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether Andy Warhol violated the copyright law by drawing on a photograph for a series of images of the musician Prince. The case will test the scope of the fair use defense to copyright infringement and how to assess if a new work based on an older one meaningfully transformed it. The black-and-white image that Warhol used was taken in 1981 by Lynn Goldsmith, a prominent photographer whose work has appeared on more than 100 album covers. Ms. Goldsmith licensed the image to Vanity Fair in connection with a 1984 article, and Warhol altered it in a variety of ways, notably by cropping and coloring it to create what his foundation’s lawyers described as “a flat, impersonal, disembodied, masklike appearance.” The image accompanied an article titled “Purple Fame” and appeared around the time of Prince’s album “Purple Rain.” Before Warhol died in 1987, he created 15 other images of Prince drawing on the same photograph. When Prince died in 2016, Vanity Fair published a special issue celebrating his life and used one of those images, alerting Ms. Goldsmith to the existence of the other works. Litigation followed, much of it focused on whether Warhol had transformed Ms. Goldsmith’s photograph, a question that figures in the fair-use analysis. The Supreme Court has said that a work is transformative if it “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message.
