Andy Warhol is credited with the famous line that foretold a future of 15 minutes of fame for everyone. While his exact words of the phrase may be debated, Warhol was known to business and the art world alike – being an award-winning advertiser for clients such as Tiffany & Co. and Columbia Records, a proponent of digital art with the Commodore Amiga, and an avid fan of new technologies like the Polaroid SX-70 model. Warhol’s name is also appearing in today’s tech conversation, with the US Supreme Court potentially ruling on the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith case which could decide whether a series of Warhol’s images depicting Prince were truly transformative, enough to be considered as fair use under copyright law. This case has the potential to shift the interpretation of fair use law and has been deeply pondered by legal scholars due to the major implications it may have, should it be approved or disapproved.
Along with this case, the US Copyright Office has recently ruled that art produced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is not eligible for copyright protection, though artists may attempt to register works that have human authorship. However, a class action lawsuit was recently filed against OpenAI, GitHub and GitHub’s parent company Microsoft alleging that the Copilot programming AI, which is a part of the “no-code ecosystem”, infringed on coders’ work that was used to train it. Additionally, Getty Images filed a claim against AI company Stability AI, citing “brazen infringement” of its image licensing catalog, and a trio of artists are taking legal action against another AI company, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DeviantArt for reportedly scraping artists’ work and using it for their AI models.
All of these cases speak to the changes that have been happening in copyright law due to the advent of AI technology, representing the importance of considering the implications of both the recent ruling in the Warhol case and the initiative from the US Copyright Office. For Warhol fans, the outcome will be something to keep an eye out for and debate over, representing another addition to Warhol’s long-standing position as a revered artist in the business, advertising and art worlds.
