Wikipedia
is currently embroiled in a unique legal battle with British
Photographer David Slater. The problem: Slater wants Wikipedia to take
down the image of a Macaque smiling straight into the camera. This is a
picture that was taken in 2011 in Indonesia when Slater was trying to
take snaps of monkeys, except that one monkey stole his camera and took a
selfie. And now Wikipedia says that they won’t take it down since the
monkey took the image and thus owns it.
Slater
had told Telegraph UK at the time when the pics had first caused some
interest in 2011, “They 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 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.”
The
picture is currently up on Wikipedia Commons which is a database of
images and videos that are free to use by anyone online. And while
Wikipedia is sticking to the argument that the monkey that took the
image owns it, Slater says the court needs to take a call on this.
He
told Telegraph, “If the monkey took it, it owns copyright, not me,
that’s their basic argument. What they don’t realise is that it needs a
court to decide that.” He also faces a legal bill of £10,000, adds the
report.
According
to Slater, he’s doing this because photography is his bread and butter
and after all it was his equipment that the monkey used. “For every
10,000 images I take, one makes money that keeps me going. And that was
one of those images. It was like a year of work, really, ” he told
Telegraph.
The
debate has raised an interesting question on who owns the selfie taken
by a non-human. Interestingly as this BuzzFeed article points out
Wikipedia is sticking to the picture not because it really thinks that
the monkey owns the image, but because as the work of a non-human
animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.
According
to Telegraph, Wikipedia also noted in its report on, “to claim
copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial
contributions to the final image, and even then, they’d only have
copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image. This means
that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls
into the public domain .”
While the debate over authorship continues, it remains to be if court rules in Slater’s favour.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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