From NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that silkscreens pop artist Andy Warhol made of rock star Prince infringed on the copyright held by a prominent photographer who captured the original image. In a win for photographer Lynn Goldsmith, the court ruled 7-2 that Warhol’s images did not constitute “fair use” under copyright law, [… This] decision will have [a] considerable impact on various creative industries. The ruling is beneficial to people who own copyrighted content upon which other works are based, and could have a negative impact upon entities that make new works based on existing material.
What was argued here was "Transformative use" which refers to whether a new work of art adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message, in comparison to the original work.
This is often key to determining whether a work is infringing or if it is covered by fair use. The fact that the Supreme Court ruled against the Warhol Foundation in this case suggests that they did not believe Warhol's use of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph was sufficiently transformative to constitute fair use.
The good news for me is that the implications of such a decision for AI-generated art could potentially be significant enough to protect my work from being used if I so desire. Example: If an AI were to generate art based on copyrighted material, a court might consider whether the AI's work was sufficiently transformative. Given the hypothetical ruling against the Warhol Foundation, it's possible a court could decide that an AI's reproduction of a copyrighted work is not transformative enough, thus constituting copyright infringement.
My plan is to continue to copyright my works and even trademark them. I will be doing a post on how a copyright an entire series of works as well as trademarking. Talk to you soon.
