"While the end result ... will be hailed by photographers and other similarly-situated content creators, it also ratchets up the confusion meter for anyone sitting on the sidelines trying to make sense of the Second Circuit’s fair use landscape."

Copyright Lately's Aaron Moss has a similar reaction to mine re the Second Circuit's Warhol decision:

"The clear import of Goldsmith is that courts should not automatically recognize any alteration to an original work as transformative—regardless of who’s doing the altering. The problem, of course, is that the court really hasn’t offered any guidance on what is transformative. Why was Richard Prince’s composition, color palette and media deemed 'fundamentally different and new' compared to the original work, but not Warhol’s? Why was the Second Circuit able to decide that Warhol’s image wasn’t protected by fair use as a matter of law when it was unable to do so for images in Cariou that are arguably less transformative than Warhol’s? Who knows."