Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
Page Number: 47

2 

ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, INC. 
v. GOLDSMITH 
GORSUCH, J., concurring 

under the Second Circuit’s approach, the first fair-use fac-
tor requires courts to assess the purpose and character of
the challenged use.  Ante, at 21.  The Foundation now owns 
Mr. Warhol’s image of Prince and it recently sought to li-
cense  that  image  to  a  magazine  looking  for  a  depiction  of
Prince  to  accompany  an  article  about  Prince.  Ibid.  Ms. 
Goldsmith  seeks  to  license  her  copyrighted  photograph  to
exactly these kinds of buyers.  And because the purpose and 
character of the Foundation’s challenged use and the pur-
pose and character of her own protected use overlap so com-
pletely, Ms. Goldsmith argues that the first statutory factor 
does not support a fair-use affirmative defense. 

As I see it, the second view of the law is the better one. 
Nothing in the copyright statute calls on judges to speculate 
about the purpose an artist may have in mind when work-
ing  on  a  particular  project.  Nothing  in  the  law  requires
judges to try their hand at art criticism and assess the aes-
thetic  character  of  the  resulting  work.    Instead,  the  first 
statutory  fair-use  factor  instructs  courts  to  focus  on  “the 
purpose  and  character  of  the  use,  including  whether  such 
use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational 
purposes.”  §107(1) (emphases added).  By its terms, the law 
trains our attention on the particular use under challenge. 
And it asks us to assess whether the purpose and character 
of that use is different from (and thus complements) or is
the same as (and thus substitutes for) a copyrighted work.
It’s a comparatively modest inquiry focused on how and for 
what  reason  a  person  is  using  a  copyrighted  work  in  the
world, not on the moods of any artist or the aesthetic quality
of any creation.

To  my  mind,  three  contextual  clues  confirm  that  this

reading of the statutory text is the correct one. 

First, the statutory preamble to all four fair-use factors
instructs  courts  to  assess  whether  the  person  asserting  a
fair-use defense seeks to “use” a copyrighted work “for pur-
poses such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching