The Copyright Battle Over Andy Warhol’s Prince Art Heads to the Supreme Court
In 1984, Vanity Fair commissioned Andy Warhol to create an image of the then-emerging “artist known as Prince”. Warhol used a cropped photo based on a 1981 shot by photographer Lynn Goldsmith, later creating a for-sale run of 16 silkscreen images, The Prince Series. The question – of whether using Goldsmith’s image was ‘fair use’, has been occupying the federal courts for more than three years – and now Warhol’s estate is asking the US Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter.
In 2017, Goldsmith filed a copyright infringement claim against the Andy Warhol Foundation. That year, the foundation sued her, asking for a declaration that the paintings didn’t violate her copyright as the works were “entirely new creations”. In 2019, a judge ruled that Warhol surpassed Goldsmith’s copyright by transforming an image of a “vulnerable, uncomfortable person” into “an iconic, larger-than-life figure”.
