Monkey Selfie

Submission 19,042

Part of a series on Monkeys / Apes. [View Related Entries]

About

Monkey Selfie refers to viral selfie photographs taken by the Celebes crested macaque Naruto using British nature photographer David Slater's camera. The photograph's copyright has been disputed Slater, Wikimedia Commons and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) over whether the macaque should be assigned owner of the copyright.

Origin

In 2008, Slater took photographs of endangered Celebes crested macaques in Sulawesi, Indonesia.^[1] After leaving the camera on a tripod along with a remote trigger accessible to the macaques, leading to several of the monkeys taking photographs of themselves by interacting with the device. A female macaque nicknamed Naruto took several clear photographs of herself, which Slater described as a "monkey's selfie" (shown below).

Spread

On July 4th, 2011, The Daily Mail^[3] published an article about the photographs titled "Cheeky monkey! Macaque borrows photographer's camera to take hilarious self-portraits." That day, other news sites reported on the viral images, including The Telegraph,^[4] The Guardian^[5] and Metro.^[6] On August 11th, 2013, Redditor PhAm_0h submitted one of the photographs to /r/pics,^[7] where it received upwards of 1,600 points (83% upvoted) and 230 comments prior to being archived.

Copyright Disputes

On July 7th, 2011, the technology news blog TechDirt^[8] published an article speculating that Slater may not have a legitimate copyright of the selfie photographs since he claims he did not take the photographs. On July 12th, TechDirt reported that the news agency Cater News sent a notice to remove the photographers of the monkey on Slater's behalf. Additionally, several of the photographs were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, leading Slater to demand payment or removal based on his claimed copyright. The request was subsequently rejected. On August 7th, 2014, BBC News^[10] published an interview with Slater, who claimed he lost "£10,000 or more in income" due to the images being declared public domain. On December 22nd, the United States Copyright Office released a document titled "Copyrightable Authorship: What Can Be Registered,"^[12] which stated that works created by non-human animals were not subject to copyright.

PETA Lawsuit

On September 22nd, 2015, the PETA filed a lawsuit against Slater and the book publishing company Blurb, Inc. for using the photographs in the book Wildlife Personalities, requesting that Naruto be assigned copyright of the images. In January 2016, the case was dismissed by US District Judge William Orrick III, who stated that copyright protections did not extend to non-humans. In January 2016, Slater announced plans to sue Wikipedia for sharing the image without his approval. In March, PETA filed an appeal. In September 2017, the lawsuit between PETA and Slater ended in a settlement in which Slater agreed to donate 25% of future revenues from the photographs to wildlife protection charities. On September 12th, The Know YouTube channel released a video reporting on the settlement (shown below).