It may be the best picture British nature photographer David Slater never took. Slater was on a three-day trip to the Indonesian forest in 2011 when a macaque monkey grabbed his camera and took this selfie. Indeed, the monkey took hundreds of pictures. Some of those pictures were distributed on the Wikimedia Commons website. Slater demanded that it be taken down as copyrighted material. However, Wikimedia refused on the grounds that a monkey took the picture, not Slater.
Slater says that he was told that “If the monkey took it, it owns copyright, not me.”
However, Wikimedia Foundation’s chief communications officer Katherine Maher corrected him in saying that the “Monkeys don’t own copyrights.” In other words, if the Monkey would hold the copyright, no one holds the copyright. The monkey gets bananas and Slater gets bupkus.
Slater is promising to fight the claim and this could make for an interesting legal opinion.
Source: ABA Journal
