Can a monkey own a picture?
Source: David Slater
Well, no. But that seems to be the question everyone is struggling with �C including nature photographer David Slater �C after Wikimedia, the owners of Wikipedia, refused to remove the viral image above from their free-to-use website.
The British snapper’s equipment was used to capture the (frankly, brilliant) image of the smiling ‘selfie’ monkey in 2011, before ‘selfie’ even became a commonly used word, when he photographing crested black macaques in Indonesia.
However, he claims he is losing huge sums of money in potential revenue because the pictures are often reproduced without incurring a fee, via Wikipedia’s Creative Commons licence.
The story goes that the inquisitive �C and photogenic �C primate got hold of one of Mr Slater’s cameras and started snapping away.
At the time, Mr Slater said: ‘He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn’t worked that out yet.’
From that session emerged a few priceless pics, shortly before Kim Kardashian ruined the selfie forever.
But Mr Slater is currently facing a legal battle with Wikimedia after the organisation added the image to its collection of royalty-free images online.
Their perspective is that he does not count as the copyright owner and therefore will not remove the image.
‘As the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested,’ the license reads.
Mr Slater has had his request for the image to be removed from Wikipedia denied again, with a court case seemingly in the offing.
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