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| The "Monkey Selfies" |
According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, the word selfie is defined as “a photograph that one has
taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared
via social media.”
However it turns out
humans are not the only animals that are obsessed with this new form of
photography. Cats, monkeys, elephants,
sloths and even kangaroos have tried to take a snap of themselves. However,
when a female Celebes crested macaque decided to join the party, things took a
wrong turn.
In 2011, a nature
photographer named David Slater travelled to the country of Indonesia to take
some pictures and study the habitat of these Macaques. He deliberately set up
his camera on a tripod stand and kept the trigger of the camera clear and visible
to the monkeys. Most of them were scared by the alien object. However, one
curious female came close to the camera and intrigued by the trigger eventually
pressed it. Though most of the snaps were unusable, a few were exceptional,
just as a human would like his photo to be. Slater licensed the image to the
Caters News Agency, under the presumption that he held copyright to
the photo; Slater claimed that he had "engineered" the shot, and that
"it was artistry and idea to leave them to play with the camera and it was
all in my eyesight. I knew the monkeys were very likely to do this and I
predicted it. I knew there was a chance of a photo being taken."
This is very things got
out of hand. Slater's copyright claim was questioned by many, who argued that
the photograph was in the domain because the monkey was not a legal person capable
of holding a copyright, and Slater could not hold copyright to the photo
because he was not involved in its creation.
Slater told BBC
News that he had suffered financial loss as a result of the pictures being
available on Wikimedia Commons, "I made £2,000 [for that picture] in the
first year after it was taken. After it went on Wikipedia all interest in
buying it went. It's hard to put a figure on it but I reckon I've lost £10,000
or more in income. It's killing my business." Slater was saying,
"What they don't realize is that it needs a court to decide [the
copyright]."
American and British lawyers
Mary M. Luria and Charles Swan said that because the creator of the photograph
is an animal and not a person, there is no copyright on the photograph,
regardless of who owns the equipment with which the photograph was created.
However, British media lawyer Christina Michalos said that on the
basis of British law on computer-generated art, it is arguable that the
photographer may own copyrights on the photograph, because he owned and
presumably had set up the camera.
On December 22, 2014,
the United States Copyright Office clarified its practices, explicitly stating
that works created by a non-human are not subject to copyright, and lists in
their examples a "photograph taken by a monkey”. On September 22, 2015, PETA filed
a suit in the US to request that the monkey be assigned copyright.
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