Ethical Implications of AI-Generated Art
recontextualize pre-existing images to create a new piece of art. For decades, there has been tension between appropriation art and US copyright law, and it could certainly be said that the courts have delivered inconsistent outcomes, depending on the situation. 25 Around 1984, photographer Lynn Goldsmith took a photograph of rockstar Prince. The picture was licensed to the magazine Vanity Fair, which would later commission Andy Warhol to create a new piece of art using Goldsmith’s image. Warhol, however, used the picture to create fifteen unlicensed works that became known as the Prince Series . Following Prince’s death, Goldsmith learned that Warhol had used her photograph and initiated a lawsuit against the Warhol Foundation, resulting in a protracted legal battle. Ultimately, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with Goldsmith. This verdict was based on the determination that the Prince Series lacked new artistic character when compared to the original photograph. The Court also clarified that it made no difference whether the Prince Series was recognizable as Warhol’s work, as it believed that this would create a plagiarist advantage to celebrities. 26 So, it would seem that a precedent has been set, and it is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that courts will rein in generative artificial intelligence. However, this ruling seems to run contrary to a previous court decision in Cariou v. Prince . In this case, the chief work of concern was Richard Prince’s Canal Zone Series , a collection of paintings that incorporated photographs taken by French photographer Patrick Cariou. In 2009, Cariou brought a copyright infringement against Richard Prince, Gagosian Gallery, Lawrence Gagosian, and the catalogue publisher Rizzoli, and in March 2011, the courts ruled against Richard Prince, ordering the defendants to destroy remaining copies of the catalogue and any 25 Azmina Jasani and Emelyne Peticca, “The Tension between Copyright Law and Appropriation Art: Where Is the Line between Artistic Innovation and Stealing?,” The Art Newspaper - International Art News and Events , September 29, 2021, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/09/29/the-tension- between-copyright-law-and-appropriation-art-where-is-the-line-between-artistic-innovation-and- stealing. 26 Jasani and Peticca, “The Tension between Copyright Law and Appropriation Art: Where Is the Line between Artistic Innovation and Stealing?”
Volume VII (2024) 12
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