[Aachen]

> transformativeness is not dispositive in and of itself in the context of a fair use defense

Could you dumb this sentence down for me?

I would guess it means that making a derived work, changing the original, makes no difference in whether reproducing the work (in altered form) is fair use.

But that sounds well-established, I can't imagine that movies would suddenly be legal to distribute if you just distribute the file backwards (people can then reverse it again to watch it), whether or not you claim that the distribution is fair use or not copyrighted to begin with or whatever. Probably that's not what this court had to decide and I'm misunderstanding something?

[jasrys]

Sure. In an infringement lawsuit involving a fair use defense, courts will apply the "four prong" test [1] to determine whether or not such use is indeed fair use under copyright law. The first of the four prongs, the "purpose and character" of the use, is also known as "transformativeness." The Goldsmith/Warhol ruling (to simplify) said that Warhol's changes to Goldsmith's photograph were not sufficiently "transformative" even though they contained new expression (adding orange color etc.) because the end result effectively competed with the original photograph and therefore did not qualify as a fair use.

Right, your backwards movie example would fail the fair use test too. Nothing's really added, there's no new expression, it competes with the original, etc.

[1]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/