When is a copyright infringement case ripe for dismissal at the outset because the secondary work clearly made fair use of the first-in-time work? And, if a court grants the defendant’s motion to dismiss, should the judge then award the defendant its attorneys’ fees in defending the case? These issues were explored in a recent Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision – Yang. v. Mic Network Inc. Here’s what you need to know.

The Supreme Court will hear the closely-watched dispute over whether the Warhol Foundation made fair use of photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph of Prince.

Barbara Kruger, Robert Storr, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, and others recently filed amici curiae (“friends of the court”) briefs, urging the Supreme Court to grant The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ petition for a writ of certiorari, arguing that the nation’s highest court should reconsider the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision against the Foundation in a well-publicized copyright case. We discuss these amici briefs here.

The U.S. copyright law has a pre-litigation procedure allowing copyright holders to identify alleged infringers through unmasking subpoenas. In this blog post, we discuss the law surrounding these subpoenas and a recent case in which anonymous bloggers tried in vain to quash an unmasking subpoena.  This subpoena procedure is of relevance to creatives policing infringement, and to those wishing to exercise their First Amendment rights anonymously.

In this blog post, we cover the Second Circuit's August 2021 amended opinion in the fair use case involving the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and photographer Lynn Goldsmith.

Recently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court ruling that the Metropolitan Museum of Art did not infringe a photographer’s copyright in an image of Eddie Van Halen because the museum’s use of the image in its online exhibition catalogue constituted fair use.  This decision is relevant to all galleries and museums that exhibit artworks digitally, which has only increased since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Here’s what you need to know.

Recently, a federal appeals court in New York held that artwork by Andy Warhol, a leading figure of the Pop Art movement, is not “transformative” and that the artist’s foundation committed copyright infringement when it licensed the reproduction of one of his works. Does the decision represent a shift in the copyright law? Here’s what you need to know.