Posts Tagged: "fair use factors"

On Friday, April 2, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a Summary Order affirming a district court’s finding that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s use of a photographer’s photo on its website to illustrate a museum exhibit constituted a fair use. The photo was taken by Lawrence Marano in 1982 and depicted Eddie Van Halen playing his iconic “Frankenstein” guitar. The Metropolitan Museum featured the photograph on its website as part of an exhibit of rock n’ roll instruments. Marano initially brought his complaint against the museum in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2019, and the court dismissed it in 2020 for failure to state a claim, “finding that Marano had ‘failed to show why the Met’s use of [the Photo] is not protected by the fair use exception.’”

On March 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York’s decision that Andy Warhol’s Prince Series constituted fair use of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph, holding that “the district court erred in its assessment and application of the fair-use factors and the works in question do not qualify as fair use.” The Court of Appeals further concluded that the Prince Series works were substantially similar to the Goldsmith Photograph “as a matter of law.” In 1981, Defendant-Appellant Lynn Goldsmith (Goldsmith) took several photographs of the then up-and-coming musical artist Prince Rogers Nelson (Prince). In 1984, Goldsmith’s agency, Defendant-Appellant Lynn Goldsmith, Ltd. (LGL) licensed one of the photographs from the 1981 photoshoot to Vanity Fair magazine “for use as an artist reference.” Unbeknownst to Goldsmith and LGL, the artist who used her photo as inspiration was Andy Warhol, and not only did he use her photo for inspiration for the image Vanity Fair commissioned, but he continued to create an additional 15 works, which are known as the “Prince Series.”