Portrait of Prince, did Warhol infringe copyright? Legal dispute ends in settlement

The litigation that pitted the Andy Warhol Foundation against photographer Lynn Goldsmith ended with a settlement worth about $21,000 . The case has been holding court since 2016: the U.S. photographer, one of the best-known photographers of musicians, believed Andy Warhol had committed copyright infringement by running his series dedicated to Prince, based on a photograph Goldsmith had taken of the singer in 1981. Warhol allegedly used the photograph, published in Vanity Fair in 1984, to derive his artwork: specifically, the artist cut it out and colored it to create fifteen images of Prince.

It was not until 2016, however, that Goldsmith learned of the existence of Warhol’s work, and from there began the legal action that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed with the photographer, upholding the Court of Appeals’ judgment that had overturned the Manhattan District Court’s initial ruling that "every work in the Prince series is immediately recognizable as a Warhol rather than a Prince photograph, in the same way that Warhol’s famous depictions of Marilyn Monroe and Mao are recognizable as Warhol and not as realistic photographs of those people.“ According to Judge Gerard Lynch of the appeals court, however, the district judge did not have to ”assume the role of an art critic and attempt to ascertain the intent or meaning of the works in question. This is true both because judges are usually ill-suited to make aesthetic judgments and because such perceptions are inherently subjective," and he was to limit himself to figuring out whether Warhol’s work could be considered aderivative work by retaining “the essential elements of Goldsmith’s photograph without significantly adding or altering them.” And this was the line confirmed by the Supreme Court as well: according to the highest U.S. court, in fact, Warhol had committed infringement by using Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph as the basis for his work.

However, the Supreme Court did not determine whether the decision should apply to the entire series dedicated to Prince or to a specific image. This ambiguity left an opening for possible new legal challenges between the Warhol Foundation and Lynn Goldsmith. Thus, to put an end to the dispute, the two parties came to an agreement: the foundation that manages Warhol’s estate will pay Lynn Goldsmith $10,250 for the license related to the publication of the works on Prince in 2016 (the images of the series in fact appeared in an issue of Vanity Fair all dedicated to the singer: it was from that publication that Lynn Goldsmith learned of the existence of the work) and another $11,000 or so for legal fees. Legal end of the matter, then, but the game is far from over, and the debate will go on for a long time to come, and the topic is a thorny and important one: can artists, in creating their works, go as far as they can without infringing on someone else’s copyright?

Pictured is Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph and portrait of Andy Warhol.

Portrait of Prince, did Warhol infringe copyright? Legal dispute ends in settlement

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