Have you heard the one about the monkey and the selfie? No, seriously.
In 2011, British nature photographer David Slater ended up with a photograph of a monkey (a Sulawesi, Indonesian black crested macaque, to be exact) named Naruto. It’s not exactly clear how the monkey’s name came to be, or how it was initially communicated to us humans, but that’s another story. Slater claimed he was on a photo expedition in Indonesia when Naruto approached him and started investigating his equipment. The monkey then hijacked his camera, taking hundreds of photographs at his whimsy. The majority of the photographs ended up being relatively useless, as they were blurry and of the jungle floor. But at least a few of the images were useful, including a selfie taken by a smiling Naruto, who appeared to be hamming it up for the camera. According to Slater:
“[The monkeys] were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button. The sound got [Naruto’s] 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. 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.”
Slater also owned a self-publishing website, Blurb, which published the monkey selfie in one of his photography books. Wikimedia Commons, the parent company behind everyone’s favorite fact-checking website, Wikipedia, made the photograph available as part of its repository of 22 million+ royalty-free images and videos. When Slater discovered this, he sent a DMCA notice to Wikimedia Commons, claiming he owned the photo and he contested the unlicensed distribution of his work. DMCA takedown notices are intended to notify a company, usually a web host or a search engine, that they are either hosting or linking to copyright-infringing material. It provides them notice to remove the copyrighted works. In response, Wikimedia Commons declined to take down the selfie, claiming that Naruto owned the photograph and not Slater, because the monkey pointed the camera and clicked the button to release the shutter – hence taking the actual picture. Because monkeys can’t own copyrights, Wikimedia claimed the photograph belonged in the public domain. The story went viral on the internet, and PETA stepped in to represent Naruto.
In January of this year, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of the Northern District of California acknowledged many federal statutes give humans the right to sue on behalf of our furry friends, but copyright reasons are not one of them. The court dismissed the suit based on the Ninth Circuit case Cetacean v. Bush, a precedent established from a case brought against the U.S. Navy for using sonar systems that are allegedly harmful to marine animals.
But it isn’t over until it’s over, and PETA recently filed an appeal of Naruto’s copyright case to the Ninth Circuit. If you recall Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscar Selfie from 2014, similar authorship questions arose because it was actor Bradley Cooper who pushed the camera shutter button taking the photo that was re-Tweeted over 3 million times. Twitter’s copyright page states: “In general, the photographer and NOT the subject of a photograph is the actual rights holder of the resulting photograph.” However, Cooper wasn’t involved in a litigious ownership issue against DeGeneres, and the image wasn’t published on Twitter. However, will some of this recent selfie ownership discussion fuel Naruto’s appeal? The appeal brief should be filed in the next month or so, when the Ninth Circuit will rule on the matter and decide if the district court ruling should be upheld or dismissed. Then, finally, we can all sleep at night knowing if we have to compensate our household pets for all of those YouTube videos they have been taking of us and posting online against our will.