A legal dispute that will test the limits of fair use
I think both sides are right, and that this is another example of why copyright is not a good abstraction. It ultimately doesn&#x27;t make sense because the way we learn how to do things is by imperfectly copying each other. Being successful means to successfully produce a stylish, architectural variation of combinations of fragments of things that you&#x27;ve seen before.<p>Part of the quality judgement on a work is in the nature of its comment on what has come before. This is whether you&#x27;re putting on a play, designing a skyscraper, or designing the API to a website that keeps track of people&#x27;s coin collections. If you fail to stylishly or profoundly reference things that have come before, your art is probably bad.<p>edit: and by &quot;I think both sides are right&quot; I mean that I think the pieces of art are completely different to the point of barely resembling one another, just the shape has been retained. I also think that the photographer contributed as much to the work&#x27;s construction as the artist, and deserves as much of the profit and say in the decision-making about how it is used. And I should use collective pronouns for the artist, because Andy Warhol likely just told somebody to paint on the photograph, and suggested colors, then approved the best of 10.