the fair use doctrine’s guarantee of breathing space….
Campbell, 510 U.S. at 579, 114 S.Ct. 1164 (citations and some quotation marks omitted) (quoting Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342, 348 *No. 4,901) (C.C.D.Mass.1841) (Story, J.). “If ‘the secondary use adds value to the original—if [the original work] is used as raw material, transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings—this is the very type of activity that the fair use doctrine intends to protect for the enrichment of society.’ ” Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 142 (quoting Leval 1111). For a use to be fair, it “must be productive and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original.” Leval at 1111.
The district court imposed a requirement that, to qualify for a fair use defense, a secondary use must “comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works.” Cariou, 784 F.Supp.2d at 348. Certainly, many types of fair use, such as satire and parody, invariably comment on an original work and/or on popular culture. For example, the rap group 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” “was clearly intended to ridicule the white-bread original.” Campbell, 510 U.S. at 582, 114 S.Ct. 1164 (quotation marks omitted). Much of Andy Warhol’s work, including work incorporating appropriated images of Campbell’s soup cans or of Marilyn Monroe, comments on consumer culture and explores the relationship between celebrity culture and advertising. As even Cariou concedes, however, the district court’s legal premise was not correct. The law imposes no requirement that a work comment on the original or its author in order to be considered transformative, and a secondary work may constitute a fair use even if it serves some purpose other than those (criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research) identified in the preamble to the statute. Id. at 577, 114 S.Ct. 1164; Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 561, 105 S.Ct. 2218. Instead, as the Supreme Court as well as decisions from our court have emphasized, to qualify as a fair use, a new work generally must alter the original with “new expression, meaning, or message.” Campbell, 510 U.S. at 579, 114 S.Ct. 1164; see also Blanch, 467 F.3d at 253 (original must be employed “in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings” (quotation marks omitted)); Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 142.
Here, our observation of Prince’s artworks themselves convinces us of the transformative nature of all but five, which we discuss separately below. These twenty-five of Prince’s artworks manifest an entirely different aesthetic from Cariou’s photographs. Where’ Cariou's serene and deliberately composed portraits and landscape photographs depict the natural beauty of Rastafarians and their surrounding environs, Prince’s crude and jarring works, on the other hand, are hectic and provocative. Cariou’s black-and-white photographs were printed in a 9 1/2″ × 12″ book. Prince has created collages on canvas that incorporate color, feature distorted human and other forms and settings, and measure between ten and nearly a hundred times the size of the photographs. Prince’s composition, presentation, scale, color palette, and media are fundamentally different and new compared to the photographs, as is the expressive nature of Prince’s work. See Campbell, 510 U.S. at 579, 114 S.Ct. 1164.
Prince’s deposition testimony further demonstrates his drastically different approach and aesthetic from Cariou’s. Prince testified that he “[doesn’t] have any really interest in what [another artist’s]
