TWIG 685: Only on Thursdays

TWiT Shows This Week In Google
1

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

1 Like
2

Absolutely fantastic show this week, Cathy was absolutely brilliant, great insights into the Supreme Court and its processes.

2 Likes
3

I listened to the whole recording afterwards. I really got the feeling that we missed a lot of the salient facts in the podcast, just due to the complexity. Here were my (possibly flawed) takeaways.

  1. The defendant (Warhol Foundation) is requesting a change to the legal theory regarding how the 4 parts of fair use are assessed. It argued that the “meaning and message” of the original picture were substantially changed.
  2. Because of this argument around meaning, we got a variety of descriptions about the purpose of art.
  3. Chief Justice Roberts would probably grate on @ant_pruitt in the way that he continually described photography: “The purpose of art is to convey a message, while the purpose of photography in this case was just to depict Prince.” It was not encouraging to me that he had such a narrow grasp of photography.
  4. Warhol was very familiar with copyright law by this time. He had been sued over his use of photographs, and so at the time of this piece, he had regularly gone to photograph subjects personally, although he did not do so in this case.
  5. It really appeared to me that the Warhol Foundation was arguing that Warhol’s art changed the message of the photo from “Prince is vulnerable” to “Prince has been changed by pop culture” and that this was sufficient to have it fall under fair use, even though the art was sold to the magazine, competing directly against the original photographer. Several Justices had trouble wrapping their heads around what the “market” of each piece was. As in, does the market now change when the meaning changes, because who would buy frail Prince when you’re looking for icon Prince?

Copyright law sure is something… Definitely feels like the only people winning are mass media creators at this ridiculous game.

1 Like
4

sorry you think i have a narrow grasp of photography. thanks for the feedback and detailed commentary. this was a really good episode.

1 Like
5

I think he was saying Justice Roberts had a narrow view of photograpy - and that it would irritate you. We all know photography is art.

4 Likes