The grinning selfies of 6-year-old Naruto, a rare crested macaque, were taken in 2011 during British nature photographer David Slater’s trip to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
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The monkey in question is Naruto, a six-year-old macaque who lives in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
But Slater insisted he held copyright in the same way a wildlife photographer would own an image when an animal fires the shutter remotely by crossing an infrared beam set up for that objective.
We could consequently witness a ground-breaking step forward in society – the acknowledgement that animal rights should be recognised for the sake of animals and not for the exploitative benefit of humans.
The lawsuit names Slater; his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd.; and publisher Blurb, which issued a collection of Slater’s photographs that included two of the selfies snapped by Naruto. And in the United States, the term “authorship” implies that the work comes from human being, Cevallos said. Slater had claimed he owned the copyright, since hey, it was his camera, and he played a role in the photo’s creation, something no other person could say.
“The facts are that I was the intellect behind the photos, I set the whole thing up”, he said in an email.
“Because the monkey cannot create a copyrightable work, that work can never be copyrightable”, he said.
PETA has on occasion pursued lawsuits that were widely viewed by other legal experts as offering little chance of success – for example, a 2011 lawsuit accusing the SeaWorld parks of keeping five killer whales in conditions that violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on slavery.
While PETA claims the monkey has copyright of the selfie, Wikimedia claims no one does. “A monkey pressed the button, but I did all the setting up”, Slater told the National Post previous year. “I have very little else to offer her”.
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“The lawsuit seeks to have Naruto declared the “author” and owner of his photograph”, PETA added.
