One of the things that strikes me most about the “monkey selfie” dustup involving Wikimedia and photographer David Slater is that much of the discussion seems to be about people’s opinion of who should own the selfie, rather than the law. We all have opinions, but in coming to conclusions about legal matters, the law governs. I’d rather that you know about the law – a number of articles that I have read seem to get it twisted. So here is what I can tell you about the law in this case:
- Since Slater says that the monkey stole the camera, ran off, and took the selfies, then the monkey would be the photographer (bad monkey, though!). In another version of the story, Slater set up the camera so that the monkey would be more or less automatically captured on film. If the latter set of facts is true, then Slater would have a good case that he owns the copyright to the photo. I wasn’t there, so I can’t weigh in on the facts.
- If the monkey is solely responsible for the photo, then nobody owns the photo. The monkey doesn’t own the photo (as some have said) – at least under US law, animals can’t generate copyrightable work.
- It doesn’t matter who owned the camera. Ownership of the equipment doesn’t give you any rights to copyrighted work, in and of itself.
- To really understand who owns the work, we would need to examine Indonesian law. I haven’t and don’t plan to but will just assume that it is similar to United States law.
- If nobody owns the photo, then it would likely be in the public domain, thus freeing Wikimedia to include it here.
I think that the story has resonance for a couple of reasons. First, it’s cool whenever an animal pretends to behave like a human. Second, copyright has become an interesting issue to many people lately.
In the discussion of the monkey selfie, there are people who understand that the law essentially governs the outcome, and depending on the facts it’s not a really hard matter to sort out. I think much of the debate arises because there are enough people out there who feel that there is some injustice done to the photographer. Maybe, but that issue is not a legal one.
