In May 2023, the United States Supreme Court delivered its landmark ruling in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023), fundamentally curtailing the expansive interpretation of “transformative use” that had animated the first fair use factor under 17 U.S.C. § 107 since Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994). The Court’s seven-to-two decision, authored by Justice Sotomayor, held that where a secondary work shares a substantially similar commercial purpose with the original, the addition of new expression or meaning does not, standing alone, render the use “transformative” for purposes of the fair use defence. This article examines the doctrinal significance of the Warhol decision for Indian copyright law, specifically its implications for the interpretation of Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. Unlike the United States’ open-ended fair use standard, India employs a closed-list fair dealing regime under Section 52(1)(a)–(q), which enumerates specific categories of permissible use. However, Indian courts have increasingly drawn upon the transformative use concept in interpreting the scope of fair dealing, particularly in cases involving parody, criticism, and emerging digital technologies. This article argues that the Warhol decision’s retrenchment of transformative use should serve as a cautionary signal for Indian courts, which must resist the impulse to import an open-ended American-style balancing test into the structured architecture of Section 52, while simultaneously developing principled methods for addressing novel claims of fair dealing in the context of artificial intelligence training, algorithmic content generation, and digital appropriation art.

Keywords: fair use, fair dealing, transformative use, copyright, Section 52, Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, appropriation art, derivative works, artificial intelligence, Indian Copyright Act 1957