Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
Page Number: 61.0

10  ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, INC. 

v. GOLDSMITH 
KAGAN, J., dissenting 

not have been more different. 

A thought experiment may pound the point home.  Sup-
pose you were the editor of Vanity Fair or Condé Nast, pub-
lishing an article about Prince.  You need, of course, some 
kind of picture.  An employee comes to you with two options: 
the Goldsmith photo, the Warhol portrait.  Would you say 
that you don’t really care?  That the employee is free to flip 
a coin?  In the majority’s view, you apparently would.  Its 
opinion, as further discussed below, is built on the idea that
both are just “portraits of Prince” that may equivalently be
“used  to  depict  Prince  in  magazine  stories  about  Prince.” 
Ante, at 12–13; see ante, at 22–23, and n. 11, 27, n. 15, 33, 
35.  All I can say is that it’s a good thing the majority isn’t 
in the magazine business.  Of course you would care!  You 
would be drawn aesthetically to one, or instead to the other.
You would want to convey the message of one, or instead of 
the other.  The point here is not that one is better and the 
other worse.  The point is that they are fundamentally dif-
ferent.  You would see them not as “substitute[s],” but as 
divergent  ways  to  (in  the  majority’s  mantra)  “illustrate  a 
magazine about Prince with a portrait of Prince.”  Ante, at 
15, 33; see ante, at 22–23, and n. 11, 27, n. 15, 35.  Or else 
you (like the majority) would not have much of a future in
magazine publishing.

In any event, the editors of Vanity Fair and Condé Nast 
understood the difference—the gulf in both aesthetics and 
meaning—between  the  Goldsmith  photo  and  the  Warhol
portrait.  They knew about the photo; but they wanted the 
portrait.  They saw that as between the two works, Warhol 
had effected a transformation. 

B 
The question in this case is whether that transformation
should matter in assessing whether Warhol made “fair use” 
of  Goldsmith’s  copyrighted  photo.    The  answer  is  yes—it
should push toward (although not dictate) a finding of fair