"The remand notwithstanding, today’s decision protects a long-standing tradition of using existing imagery as raw material for new artistic expression and this opinion will play a key role in the fight to maintain artists’ rights to continue to do so."

Julie Ahrens of the Stanford Fair Use Project is pleased with the Prince decision:

"The decision confirms the principle that a use can be fair even if it doesn’t criticize or comment on the original work. While it it’s far from groundbreaking to say that commentary or criticism isn’t necessary for fair use, it is a principle that hasn’t been applied before in the visual art context. Here the Court held that copyrighted images can be used as raw material to create new works of art, even where the artist had nothing to say about the images he relied upon. Transformation can be found where the artist’s expression and 'composition, presentation, scale, color palette, and media are fundamentally different and new compared to the photographs.'"