An interesting story related to copyright has been developing since last week. The story centers on photographs taken by a Macaque monkey in the company of nature photographer David Slater. During a photo expedition in Indonesia, Mr. Slater’s camera was briefly lifted by said monkey and while the camera was in her possession, she managed to snap a few spectacular photos of herself. Mr. Slater was able to retrieve his camera and the photographs were published in the Daily Mail earlier this month.
Techdirt posted the photos and wrote a short article that questioned who actually owns the copyright of the photos, if anyone. The Caters News Agency, representing David Slater, claims ownership but since the photographer, in this case the monkey, generally has the right to ownership, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick questioned the legitimacy of this claim. This article is linked below:
Masnick, Mike. “Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?” Techdirt. Web. 7 July 2011.
Then, last week, Techdirt posted another article detailing the correspondence between a representative at Caters News Agency and Mike Masnick where the former requests the latter remove the photos from the Techdirt website. This request came about despite the ambiguity of the copyright law with respect to photographs of such origin. Citation/link below:
Masnick, Mike. “Monkeys Don’t Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos.” Techdirt. Web. 12 July 2011.
This weekend, On the Media also covered this story cast in the broader context of the PROTECT IP Act, introduced to the Senate in May of this year.
On the Media. “Congress, copyrights and monkeys.” Web. 15 July 2011.
*I apologize for the simian pun.
