PETA is asking the court to allow the group to use the proceeds from the “monkey selfie” to benefit Naruto and other macaques in the region.
Advertisement
Now the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has seized on the case to strike a blow for animals rights.
The Copyright Act of 1976 was “sufficiently broad…to extend to any original work, including those created by Naruto”, the group’s complaint read. The monkey hijacked the camera during a 2011 shoot in Indonesia and took tons of pictures.
However, the photos have been widely distributed elsewhere by outlets, including Wikipedia, which contend that no one owns the copyright to the images because they were taken by an animal, not a person.
The lawsuit names Slater, his UK-based company Wildlife Personalities, and Blurb, Inc., a Delaware-based corporation which beginning previous year published and sold for profit in the United States a book containing copies of the photos.
To be fair to PETA’s point of view, it seems Naurto did, in fact, have the same kind of agency, ability, and creativity that any human being possesses when taking a selfie.
The suit is seeking to have the monkey declared the “author” and legal owner of the photograph.
Slater says he set up his tripod and walked away for a few minutes.
The picture has been in dispute for more than a year.
Speaking to The Associated Press, Slater argued that he was the “intellect behind the photos” as he “set the whole thing up”.
“I sincerely wish my 5-year-old daughter to be able to be proud of her father and inherit my copyrights so that she can make my work into an asset and inheritance and go to university”, he wrote in his email.
The U.S. Copyright Office even weighed in on the matter.
“If we prevail in this lawsuit, it will be the first time that a nonhuman animal is declared the owner of property, rather than being declared a piece of property himself or herself”, PETA lawyer Jeffrey Kerr said in a statement.
Advertisement
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who supports animal rights, expressed misgivings about the litigation.
