Who owns the copyright to this image of a monkey?

Are we debating what the law is, or what it should be? According to this law professor, the law is clearly on Wikipedia’s side:

Just heard the guy being interviewed on the radio together with a Wiki Commons manager.

Whatever else he has been careless. Early interviews show him making major claims about the accidentality of the photos, only claiming later that he cunningly left the camera with the intention of the photos being taken.

He is also on a sticky wicket with a conflict between US and UK law.

It will probably cost him more to attempt to gain copyright protection than the photo is worth.

My guess is that he’s been hoist by his own petard; part of what makes the image memorable, and thus lucrative, was the story he told about its creation - which may or may not be 100% true. In order to own copyright, he has to demonstrate some sort of creativity on his part, which isn’t compatible with ‘the monkey did it all’.

Monkey 22

I know nothing about the law other than what I’ve heard in online discussions. AFAICT, the law isn’t on Slater’s side in this one, but that’s me parroting what I’ve heard from others.

However, I think Slater should have the copyright to the picture. The macaque may have taken the picture, but he’s the one who did everything that led up to the macaque’s having the opportunity to do so.

If Slater had paid an assistant to come along on his trip, and the assistant had taken the picture, it likely would have been Slater’s copyright as well, because pretty much anytime you produce something for someone in your capacity as their employee, you’ve somewhere along the way signed an agreement that your work output belongs to the employer. And this is reasonable not just because the employer is paying you, but because the employer is the one who’s set things up so that your work can take place and has value.

Same thing here. Slater traveled at some expense to an obscure corner of the world, taking his cameras and stuff with him, which made it possible for the macaque to take the pic. Unless and until monkeys can own stuff, Slater should own this pic.

No, this analogy doesn’t work. An employee can make something with copyright because an employee is a human, and humans exercising creativity is what makes things copyright. The employee can then transfer the copyright to his or her employee, on the express or implied understanding that they are being paid for it, via their salary.

IF Slater’s story is true and the monkey stole his camera, Slater has not exercised any creativity in the making of the pic. The monkey has, but not being human, cannot create or own copyright. Therefore, no-one does.

The Dadas would side with Slater. Like Duchamp’s Fountain, Slater took a found object and presented it as a work of art. His own creative act was the intellectual recognition that the monkey photo had intrinsic artistic value.

But everybody thought the Dadas were nuts, so I’m sticking with the monkey. Was this some sort of camera that let him see what the camera saw, like a mirror? Because it looks for all the world like he’s checking out his teeth.

No, you would not be in breach of anyone’s copyright any more than would 2 photographers who take pictures of the same event or two people who simultaneously sculpt the same subject, IMO.

We know he modified it. Even Wikimedia identifies it in the link above as a cropped & rotated image.

But there is also the raw image, that he rotated and cropped from.

The OP specifically discusses both images, so both are fair topics for this conversation.

I’m unable to find a filed court case.

Apparently this is the raw image.

I think he’s off the mark there, as when a newspaper publisher gives me a typewriter, they most assuredly will own the copyright to the work I produce.

Oh, and feel free to debate what the law should be. It’s an intrinsic part of the discussion.

They own the copyright to the work you produce because you’ve signed a contract indicating that you’ll give them the rights to the material in exchange for money. The ownership of the typewriter doesn’t come in to it.

This isn’t true in the least. The monkey pressing the button was only one small step in an otherwise long and complicated procedure that resulted in the image. If the monkey had only pressed the button to take the picture, but Slater had never pressed the button to view the picture, would the picture still exist? Until Slater pressed “View Picture” that was just a bunch of numbers on a chip, wasn’t it? So really Slater created the images we saw; the monkey just created the numbers that would become the picture.

That’s a terrible argument. By that logic, if Slater had had an assistant who reviewed the camera’s memory first, the assistant would own the rights to the image - and, presumably, would therefore have some stake in the rights to every other image Slater has taken that the assistant viewed first.

Actually, that’s beside the point, because this argument basically destroys the concept of intellectual property in digital images. If the act of initiating a render of a digital file counts as a creative act, then every time a person loads a webpage, they’re gaining copy rights over everything that appears on the page. Slater’s claim is certainly destroyed under this argument, because nobody is showing the original render he “created” when he accessed the picture - they’re all creating their own renders of the “found” data, just like Slater did.

One argument that could be made is to say that at the bottom of everything, law is developed with the social mandate in place. Patents, copyright, property, etc. all exist in the legal framework based on the concept that they’re there to help society and its individuals.

So while it might be a stretch to say that the owner of the camera is the owner of a photo that he didn’t take, if one does so, then it helps to provide food and shelter for a human being. And while a stretch, it isn’t an extreme one. There are reasonable arguments in favor of assigning copyright.

But what advantage is there to denying him copyright? Presumably, the public will still be able to enjoy the picture of the macaque under either path. One might worry that artists will start to leave their cameras out in the wilderness, in the hopes of repeating the performance if copyright is granted to these photos, which would be a nuisance, But I don’t know that that’s a large worry - particularly given as that then there would be artistic intent, which would be protected regardless of the outcome of this decision.

So if the goal of legal decisions, where the word of the law is not clear, is to side in the public interest, then it would be reasonable to come down on the side of assigning the camera owner the copyright.

…unless he shot JPEG only in camera at low res settings, that isn’t the “RAW” image, its a converted JPEG. The RAW file is most probably still sitting on the photographers computer. Most professional photographers shoot RAW, make their adjustments on a programme like Lightroom or Photoshop, then convert it to JPEG so other people can see it.

duplicate post somehow

No, you’re not following the logic out correctly.

Regarding your first paragraph, we’ve already established that people can be hired to produce all or part of someone else’s copyrighted material. The assistant is employed by Slater (in your hypothetical) and thus would have relinquished any claim to copyright as part of employment.

Slater gets to claim copyright here, where your hypothetical internet users don’t, because monkey’s can’t hold copyright; therefore he gets it. Your hypo seems to suppose that people can “steal” a copyright, which was not anything I ever posited.

Which brings up an interesting question: can Slater own the image without holding the copyright?

If no one has ever seen the raw image but Slater, and there are no other copies of it, can he simply withhold sharing it with the rest of us? Or, if the image is declared to be uncopyrightable and thus public domain, can we force him to show/share it with us?

Wrong, the fact that the monkey can’t hold a copyright means the work is in the public domain. Copyright is not some reward for doing work it is an incentive to individuals to create works. It is a gifted protection and not an intrinsic right.

To qualify for copyright the creator needs to show he produced it through their own creativity. the case law shows there has to be human authorship, without that it is in the public domain.

Paintings by elephants are not subject to copyright, automated security camera footage is not subject to copyright and selfies by monkeys are not subject to copyright.