Photographer David Slater has won his legal battle over that monkey selfie. A US appeals court ruled Monday that US copyright law doesn't allow animals to file copyright infringement lawsuits.
Photographer David Slater's legal nightmare surrounding that monkey selfie snapped in 2011 isn't over. A US court has decided not to toss the copyright lawsuit filed against Slater by PETA on the monkey's behalf, despite Slater and PETA reaching a settlement last year.
Photographer David Slater has finally settled his two-year legal battle over the monkey selfie photos that went viral back in 2011.
Remember David Slater, the photographer whose camera was hijacked by a monkey and used for a series of selfies that went viral on the Internet? The photographer has spent years fighting a copyright battle in court over the photos, and now he's broke.
In September, the animal rights group PETA filed a lawsuit against photographer David Slater, arguing that the monkey who took a series of viral selfies with Slater's camera in 2011 should be the rightful copyright owner.
If you thought that was strange, get this: the legal battle has now evolved into a dispute over the pictured monkey's identity and gender.
Remember that copyright controversy last year between photographer David Slater and the money that took selfies with Slater's camera back in 2011? PETA is joining in on the fracas.
The animal rights group filed a lawsuit yesterday on behalf of the monkey, a 6-year-old macaque in Indonesia named Naruto. PETA argues that Naruto is the legal copyright owner of the photos (seen above) rather than Slater, and that all proceeds from the photos should be used for the benefit of the monkey.
In its updated 1,222-page "Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition" released yesterday, the US Copyright Office took the side of Wikimedia in their argument with nature photographer David Slater when the office wrote that they cannot register works by monkeys.
David Slater, the photographer who is currently embroiled in an argument (and quite possibly, soon to be embroiled in a lawsuit) with Wikimedia over the famous 'monkey selfie' images, recently spoke to ITN to clarify his position on the whole 'who owns the copyright' argument.
The controversy surrounding the monkey selfies above, which were taken by an endangered crested black macaque using photographer David Slater's equipment, is heating up once again as Wikipedia parent Wikimedia refuses to remove the photo from its commons library, claiming that Slater does not own the copyright.
Just as the monkey photography story was dying down, a new twist emerges: on Monday tech blog TechDirt received an email from Caters News, the agency representing wildlife photographer David Slater, whose camera was hijacked by a monkey and used to shoot a number of self-portraits.
When we shared the story of how monkeys hijacked photographer David Slater's camera and unwittingly snapped some self-portraits, we asked the question "doesn’t the monkey technically own the rights to the images?" Techdirt, a blog that often highlights copyright issues, went one step further and dedicated a whole post to that question.
Three years ago wildlife photographer David Slater spent three days photographing a group of crested black macaque monkeys in an Indonesian national park. As he was trying to fend off some monkeys, another monkey approached his tripod-mounted Canon 5D and started playing with the remote shutter release.
They were quite mischievous, jumping all over my equipment. One hit the button. The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At first it scared the rest of them away but they soon came back – it was amazing to watch. [#]
Afterward, he found hundreds of photos taken by the monkeys on his memory card, including some self-portraits and even a portrait of Slater.