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Court Rules Monkey Does Not Own Selfie Copyright

  A US court has ruled that a monkey who snapped a selfie on a wildlife photographer’s camera does not own the copyright to the … Continue reading Court Rules Monkey Does Not Own Selfie Copyright

By Ignatius Igwe
Updated April 24, 2018
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(FILES) In this photograph taken on February 1, 2018, a pair of monkeys rest together at Parliament House in New Delhi. Indian police say a 16-day-old baby boy believed to have been snatched by a monkey has been found drowned in a well. The infant was sleeping under a mosquito net at his home in the eastern state of Odisha on March 30 when he was taken by a rhesus macaque, a species with a reddish-pink face common across India. “The mother is saying that she saw a monkey take away her child. She raised an alarm but the monkey quickly leaped over the roof and vanished out of sight,” police sub-inspector S.M. Baral told AFP. PRAKASH SINGH / AFP
FILE PHOTO                                                                                    Credit: PRAKASH SINGH / AFP

 

A US court has ruled that a monkey who snapped a selfie on a wildlife photographer’s camera does not own the copyright to the image, which became an internet sensation.

The ruling late Monday is expected to draw a line under a protracted legal battle between British photographer David Slater and the animal rights group PETA, which filed a suit on behalf of Naruto the monkey.

The case began in 2011 when the crested macaque monkey approached a camera Slater had set up on the forested Indonesian island of Sulawesi and managed to press the button, taking a picture of himself with what appeared to be a broad grin on his face.

The picture recorded on Slater’s camera quickly went viral, and become one of the most shared selfies ever.

But in 2015, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a US-based animal rights group, filed a suit on Naruto’s behalf, claiming the photographer had infringed Naruto’s copyright since the monkey had taken the picture himself.

An initial court ruling dismissed PETA’s case, but Slater still agreed last October to donate 25 percent of the earnings from the picture to charities that protect the habitat of macaque monkeys.

PETA sought to drop the case entirely, but a US appeals court made the unusual move of stepping in anyway and issuing a ruling that criticized the group for dropping the case despite having presented itself as the monkey’s “next friend,” a legal status normally used in court on behalf people unable to represent themselves.

The California appeals court ruled that animals cannot bring copyright infringement suits and said PETA had put its own goals ahead of the monkey’s despite its status as the animal’s “next friend.”

“Puzzlingly, while representing to the world that ‘animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any way’,” the three-judge court said, “PETA seems to employ Naruto as an unwitting pawn in its ideological goals.”

PETA responded by saying that the monkey “is discriminated against simply because he’s a nonhuman animal.”

AFP

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