From a VC blogger I find this TechDirt link. In short, a wildlife photographer left his camera unattended, and a macaque monkey wandered over to it and took some pictures, including a really amusing self-portrait.
The question that raised the writer’s interest:
I call BS on the whole thing. You don’t just leave expensive cameras lying around and the pictures are just too perfect.
I don’t see this as being any different than if the guy had dropped his camera, and it “accidentally” took a picture.
What do you think?
This. I am a semi-professional photographer (work in a related field) and travel with a $2000 body (EOS 7D) and $2000 of lenses. I never-ever even for 10 seconds leave my camera unattended. It’s locked in my hotel room or it’s strapped to my body or in my bag.
You especially don’t leave it unattended when there is curious monkeys around, the lenses scratch incredibly easily.
They are also framed perfectly, with perfect focus and exposure, you don’t get results like that on “full auto” even with a Canon EOS 5D mk II or similar. It’s all a clever publicity stunt that obviously worked for this photographer.
Forget monkeys for a minute. Suppose I’m out and about somewhere with my camera, and a stranger offers to take a picture with my camera so that I can be in the shot along with the rest of my family. Whose intellectual property is that photo? If I end up publishing it somewhere, do I have to track down the random stranger and ask their permission or compensate them?
The camera is owned by CNA or one of its employees. If I took a picture of a tourist using his camera I would be pretty surprised to find out I owned the rights to it.
ETA: In any event, I’m pretty sure the only way non-humans can hold property is if it is gifted to them, and even that only works under US property transfer law.
EETA: Beaten to punch by TB.
This is obviously viral marketing for the new Planet of the Apes movie.
The random stranger has to actively assert their copywrite before you try and publish it, don’t they? If they didn’t I dont think you have to go track them down. Even if you paint an awesome painting with no human or monkey assistance, I don’t think everyone has to automatically ask your permission to reproduce it. Hence all the copywrite notices on anything and everything, including the monkey pictures.
So in the case of the monkeys, its not whether they “own” the copywrite, obviously they don’t. its whether since the “creators” can’t own it, the news corporation can.
The monkey was able to lightly push the shutter release just enough to focus properly on himself, then snap the picture - at the right aperture and shutter speed to create a perfect focus on his own face and shallow depth of field to blur the background? No. No way.
Speculating here because IP is really not my field, but It think the monkey is property that belongs to someone/something. As such, anything of value created by the monkey would belong to the monkey’s owner…same as if my cow has a calf.
I could see a really esoteric argument between the owner of the monkey and the owner of the camera…did the monkey "create "the work by pushing a button the monkey likely did not even understand (assuming we accept at face value that the monkey did activate the camera), or did the owner of the camera “create” the work by placing it in an environment where the monkey could push the button? Was that the intent of the camera guy?
If I own an infinite number of monkeys, with an infinite number of typewriters, and one of them produces Hamlet, who owns the copyright? 
The odds seem more reasonable when you know there were infinite monkeys with infinite cameras in the woods that day, and the photographer (a Mr. Zorn) just chose the best picture out of all of them.
ETA: Damn you Thudlow!!
I like yours better.
These are completely different issues. Monkeys do not have property rights.
Like several other posters, I think this is a hoax and the photos were taken by a human. But accepting for the moment that the story is true and a monkey took its own picture, I think it would legally be regarded as a part of the physical property ie the photographer owned the camera and the film so he owns any pictures that are on the film. A monkey taking a picture would be regarded as a natural phenomena that happened to his property (like his camera getting rained on) not a legal entity creating a work of art.
Credulous soul that I am, it never occurred to me that this might be a hoax. The comments about perfect composition don’t persuade me, because of the account given by the photographer:
A well-composed shot is not as remarkable if it’s random amongst hundreds and hundreds of crappy shots.
In any event, as you say, the hypothetical doesn’t depend on the story being true…
Yeah, the one of hundreds story is a bit more credible.
This is what I’m thinking. Obviously it could immediately be written off as a hoax if the story was “The monkey picked up the camera and snapped off 3 perfectly focused and framed shots,” but a handful of brilliant but purely coincidental shots among hundreds is a pretty plausible story. It’s not necessarily true, but it’s most definitely not “1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters producing Hamlet.”
Nobody, Hamlet is in the public domain. 
The fact that Slater is in one of these supposed shots taken by a monkey isn’t unbelievable? I have a hard time imagining a photographer coming upon a wild animal playing with his expensive equipment and, rather than trying to save his equipment, figuring he’ll play along and pose for the monkey who’s using his camera to take pictures.
As for the hundreds of pictures being taken, are we supposed to believe the monkeys figured out how to reload the camera?
Why would he need to reload the camera?
That’s true in the human world, but among the macaques the issue might drag through their courts for years, with plenty of opportunity for objections and feces-throwing.
Well, maybe that part’s also true in the human world.
Anyhoo, if the macaques were intrigued by the camera’s clicking sounds and did indeed take hundreds of pictures, I can buy that these three shots were in the mix, and indeed might have been the only three shots of any value.