Warhol and Prince

Can you believe the artist Prince wrote his first song, Funk Machine, when he was just seven years old? That was in 1965, and yet he’s still making history, even after his passing.

This May, the Supreme Court found that another lost artist, Andy Warhol, infringed the copyrights of a photographer who had published a photo of Prince back in 1984. Andy Warhol’s work involved sixteen images, which he cropped and colored, to create “a flat…disembodied…appearance”, at least according to his attorneys.

The original photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, successfully argued that Warhol’s work didn’t really add something new and was therefore not protected by the fair use doctrine. I think the court was also influenced by the fact that Warhol used a silkscreen process, which creates a type of copy.

But what’s the real lesson from this case? Maybe it’s that you should do more than crop and color.

You can read the SCOTUS decision here.

Lynn Goldsmith took the photo (top) of Prince in 1981. Warhol or assistants used the photo in a silkscreen process to produce the bottom images.