Artist Richard Prince to pay photographers in copyright fight
AMERICAN PAINTER and photographer Richard Prince can no longer sell artworks that incorporate pictures taken by a pair of photographers and has agreed to hand over five times what he earned from their sales, a Manhattan federal judge said in court orders. US District Judge Sidney Stein issued the final judgments on Thursday in long-running lawsuits brought by Donald Graham and Eric McNatt, who accused the prominent appropriation artist Prince of misusing their photos in his work.
A trial in Mr. McNatt’s case was scheduled to start Monday, and Mr. Graham’s trial was set to start Feb. 20. The judgments did not specify how much Mr. Prince must pay the pair.
The cases had been considered potential tests for further defining the copyright doctrine of fair use.
Prince’s studio manager Matt Gaughan said that the artist was “pleased to have finally resolved these long-standing matters without the spectacle and burden of further litigation.”
Mr. Graham called his judgment a “victory I share with other artists who depend on copyright protection to secure a return for their creative contributions.” The photographers’ lawyer David Marriott said that the judgments “demonstrate that there is not a fair use exception to copyright law that applies to the famous and another that applies to everyone else.”
Mr. Prince is a New York-based modern artist whose works have appeared in galleries including New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His series New Portraits featured photos taken from Instagram accounts and printed onto large canvasses with selected user comments displayed underneath.
Mr. Graham said in a 2015 lawsuit that Prince misused his photo of a Rastafarian man smoking a joint in the series. Mr. McNatt accused Prince of misusing his picture of Sonic Youth band member Kim Gordon the next year.
Mr. Prince has defeated similar allegations before. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals decided in 2013 that works from his Canal Zone series made fair use of photographer Patrick Cariou’s pictures of Rastafarians by transforming them with an “entirely different aesthetic.” Mr. Prince told the Manhattan district court that he similarly transformed Mr. McNatt and Mr. Graham’s pictures, arguing that he turned “austere” depictions of “a female rocker in a defiant pose” and “a Rastafarian smoking marijuana” into an “ode to social media.”
The photographers responded that Prince’s work was “a paradigmatic example of the exploitive behavior the copyright laws were enacted to prevent.”
Mr. Stein said in May that Mr. Prince’s fair-use argument was not strong enough to end the case. — Reuters
