2023-05-18 19:52:14
The Supreme Court of USA This Thursday has become the epicenter of a earthquake that shakes the world of until and what can you have unpredictable consequences in the future of creation. Seven of the nine magistrates of the High Court have ruled that Andy Warhol violated the copyright of photographer Lynn Goldsmith by using and transforming an image she had taken of Prince. The two judges who have shown their disagreement with the decision have opined that, “by refusing to recognize the iImportance of transformative copythe Court today, and for the first time, turn your back on how creativity works”.
In the center of the case, which capsizes the principle of “fair use” or “legitimate” that has legally governed for decades the use of the material of others whenever there is a transformative result that “adds something new, with a different purpose or character, altering the first with a new expression, meaning or message”, or for critical use or For information, there is a portrait that Goldsmith, a successful music photographer, took of Prince in 1981.
In 1984, when the musician published ‘Purple Rain’, the magazine ‘Vanity Fair’ hired Warhol to create a work to accompany an article. The publication paid Goldsmith $400 to allow the image to be used as an “artist’s reference,” agreeing to also give credit and use it in one issue only. And Warhol, in his habitual way of working as an artist, he created 16 images derived from that original, of which the magazine then published one.
When Prince died in 2016, however, ‘Vanity Fair’ paid $10,250 to the Warhol Foundation, which manages the estate of the artist who died in 1987, to use another of the images from the Prince series. Then Goldsmith received no compensation or credit. And he went to the courts.
For and against
In the first court that studied the case a magistrate ruled in favor of Warhol, ensuring that he had created something new and with a new meaning. The three judges of a appeals courtnevertheless, they rejected their decision and argued that the first judge “should not have taken the role of art critic and tried to look for the intent or meaning of the works” at the center of the case, assuring that “judges are not normally trained to make aesthetic judgments and because those perceptions are inherently subjective”.
The case thus came to Supremo, where numerous voices from the art world criticized the appeals court. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, submitted a brief in which it ensured that the second sentence “strikes to the heart of the way artists today have grown to make and understand art.” And in the documentation there were also statements of artists who accused the court of appeals for “denigrate art that borrows, appropriates, or replicates previous work as something comparable to plagiarism o to exploitation“Their laments and warnings have fallen on deaf ears. The majority ruling ensures that Goldsmith’s “original works”, “like those of other photographers, deserve copyright protection, even against famous artists”. Meanwhile, Judge Elena Kagan and the president of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, have warned in their dissent brief that the decision of their colleagues “will stifle creativity of all kinds, will prevent new art and music and literature; it will thwart the expression of new ideas and the gaining of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer”, they conclude.
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