On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided that Lynn Goldsmith, a veteran American photographer known for her portraits of music celebrities, had prevailed against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in a controversial ruling with broad “fair use” implications. Will the decision, as the majority of justices held, bolster legal protection long granted to cultural innovators? Or will it, as dissenting justices and commentators contend, have a chilling effect on all “transformative” creative freedom?
The facts of the case have played out over the course of four decades. In 1981, Goldsmith published a photograph of the rising pop musician Prince Rogers Nelson in magazine. Three years later, after the album and biopic hit big, Goldsmith granted another periodical, , “one-time use” of a related image as an “artist reference for an illustration.” Andy Warhol was then commissioned to create a purple silkscreen portrait from the photograph, which ran in its November 1984 issue.
