Let's summarize, £5000 worth of equipment on a £2000 trip and the best picture has been taken by a monkey.
The monkey took "hundreds of pictures", increasing the likelihood of producing a few quality shots. Its quantitative approach has seemingly yielded the better results compared to whatever Mr. Slater has applied.
Mr. Slater can not be attributed the director role either, as the macaque has "hijacked a camera", disregarding his setup and direction.
But how could the macaque benefit from holding the copyright on the picture?
"For every 10,000 images I take, one makes money that keeps me going. And that was one of those images."
This is what it should be about. We should want him, as any other professional doing his job, to make a living. Instead of spending money on beating him on court, let's spend the money to buy rights to the picture to put it up under a creative commons license.
Why are we spending so much energy on finding out who's "right", instead of just doing "the right thing", in cases where there is a win-win situation like this.
The precedent to confirm is that those without artistic input in to the creation of a work should not be afforded automatic copyright in that work no matter the extent of their financial or technical input. This seems quite an important precedent to affirm to me.
I couldn't agree more. I think wikimedia is being incredibly unethical. I certainly won't be contributing to them anymore. If it's OK for them to use the product of Mr. Slater's equipment without his consent, why should I help them pay for their infrastructure?
Doesn't the monkey technically own copyright over the images? I mean.. just because it's this guy's camera doesn't mean he has copyright, unless the monkey transferred copyright to him via some sort of agreement.
The US Copyright Compendium states that “authorship”, which is a prerequisite for copyright, requires a human author. In previous cases copyright in natural patterns such as wood patterns has been rejected. If the purported author is a non-human animal, then there can’t be copyright (in the US).
The Compendium reflects the rulings of the Copyright Office and a court might see things differently. Or the Copyright Office might agree that this photograph was not authored by the human. If they don’t agree, then at the very least you can’t register the copyright and get statutory damages. (Unless you sue the Copyright Office to force them to register.)
Then is sounds like wikipedia is correct, a non-human took the photo, that is not disputed, not a human author, therefore the prerequisite for copyright is not met and the image is public domain.
Copyright isn't assigned to the tool owner, it is assigned to the person who created the work. I use Visual Studio, that doesn't make the code I write owned by Microsoft even they "own" Visual Studio. Bad analogy, but you get the point.
Here's another. If I leave my laptop running Visual Studio out and a monkey bangs on the keyboard to make a program (by accident, just as with this photo), I don't own the copyright to that program.
