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12  ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, INC. 

v. GOLDSMITH 
KAGAN, J., dissenting 

new and original throughout.  Every book in literature,
science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow,
and use much which was well known and used before.” 
Id., at 575 (quoting Emerson v. Davies, 8 F. Cas. 615, 
619 (No. 4,436) (CC Mass. 1845)). 

Because that is so, a copyright regime with no escape valves
would “stifle the very creativity which [the] law is designed 
to foster.”  Stewart, 495 U. S., at 236.  Fair use is such an 
escape valve.  It “allow[s] others to build upon” copyrighted
material,  so  as  not  to  “put  manacles  upon”  creative  pro-
gress.  Campbell,  510  U. S.,  at  575  (internal  quotation 
marks omitted).  In short, copyright’s core value—promot-
ing creativity—sometimes demands a pass for copying. 

To identify when that is so, the courts developed and Con-
gress later codified a multi-factored inquiry.  As the major-
ity  describes,  see  ante,  at  14,  the  current  statute  sets  out 
four non-exclusive considerations to guide courts.  They are:
(1) “the purpose and character of the use” made of the cop-
yrighted work, “including whether such use is of a commer-
cial  nature”;  (2)  “the  nature  of  the  copyrighted  work”;  (3)
“the amount and substantiality of the portion used in rela-
tion to the copyrighted work as a whole”; and (4) “the effect 
of the use upon the potential market for or value of the cop-
yrighted work.”  17 U. S. C. §107.  Those factors sometimes 
point in different directions; if so, a court must weigh them
against  each  other.  In  doing  so,  we  have  stated,  courts
should view the fourth factor—which focuses on the copy-
right holder’s economic interests—as the “most important.”
See Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 
471 U. S. 539, 566 (1985).5  But the overall balance cannot 
—————— 

5 The fourth factor has, to use the majority’s repeated example, forced 
many a filmmaker to pay for adapting books into movies—as we noted 
two Terms ago.  See Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U. S. ___, 
___ (2021) (slip op., at 30) (explaining that film adaptations may founder
on “[t]he fourth statutory factor” because “[m]aking a film of an author’s 
book”  may  result  in  “potential  or  presumed  losses  to  the  copyright