The macaque selfie

I was extremely bored as I always tend to be and so I typed 'monkey'¹ in the Google search bar and this was one of the first images that came up.

a self portrait of a brown eyed, yellow toothed macaque grinning unabashedly

I went ahead and read the concerned New Yorker article that featured it. Turns out that,

'In 2011, (British wildlife photographer David J.) Slater was visiting a park in Indonesia when a crested black macaque got a hold of one of his cameras. “They were quite mischievous, jumping all over my equipment,” Slater told the Telegraph, “and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button.” The result was hundreds of macaque selfies. The best of the images—a female macaque grinning toothily into the lens—went viral shortly thereafter, inspiring hundreds of memes and online jokes...'

Later these images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons which means they are now public domain and so anyone can use them for free. But in 2014 Slater requested Wikimedia to remove them from public domain because he thought he owned the copyright to them. But Wikimedia refused to do so and the reason is mentioned in the licensing info that is available with the upload "This file is in the public domain because, as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested."

No law exists that considers ownership of photos taken by 'non-humans' because no one in their right mind would have thought that a damn monkey would selfie himself and then there would be a dispute over the copyright of that photo.

In his defence Slater said, “In law, if I have an assistant then I still own the copyright...I believe there’s a case to be had that the monkey was my assistant.”

But it seems that he had to finally rest his case because the images are still available on the Wikimedia Commons website.

Anyway here's one more.