ASMP and The Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) have filed an amicus brief in the case of Prince et al. v. Cariou, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The brief urges the Second Circuit to uphold a New York federal judge’s decision that the fair-use exemption to copyright protection did not apply to Richard Prince’s use of Patrick Cariou’s images of Rastafarians in Jamaica in his artworks. The brief asserts that if the Second Circuit finds that the unauthorized use of copyrighted photographs for use in appropriation art is not an infringement, it will threaten the ability of their members to earn a living from their work and to continue creating and archiving new copyrighted works. Read the brief.

In a historic ruling on Congress’s power to give authors and composers monopoly power over their creations, the Supreme Court has broadly upheld the national legislature’s authority to withdraw works from the public domain and put them back under a copyright shield. The 6-2 decision (with Justice Elena Kagan not taking part) came in the case of Golan, et al., v. Holder (docket 10-545), involving a wide-ranging constitutional challenge to a federal law passed in 1994 to implement global agreements worked out in trade negotiations — the so-called Uruguay Round Agreement. The challenge, however, failed on all points. ASMP participated in amicus curiae briefs in this case from the beginning. For a summary of the Supreme Court opinion, go here.