Pete Bauer
August 7th, 2014, 04:38 PM
As if copyright law wasn't difficult enough!
If you do an internet search, you'll find a ton of similar articles, but here are a couple links that will probably not expire too quickly:
Monkey selfie sparks intellectual property debate (http://news.yahoo.com/can-a-monkey-hold-intellectual-property-175510235.html)
Wikimedia Won't Take Down This Photo Because a Monkey Took It (http://gizmodo.com/wikimedia-wont-take-down-this-photo-because-a-monkey-ow-1616874824)
The short version:
British pro photographer David Slater went into the jungle to photograph rare macaques, set up a camera and the macaques pressed the shutter button hundreds of times, resulting in a lot of useless pixels and a few money shots. (Hey, that's rather similar to my own photography style!)
Wikimedia refuses Mr. Slater's take-down requests, arguing that no copyright exists because a non-human pressed the shutter button. Wiki lists various sources, such as The Daily Mail and NBC News, so it is fairly clear that Mr. Slater himself did not offer up the photos but rather it seems they were poached from news web sites.
My FWIW take:
I side with Mr. Slater. He is the producer of the art and in my non-lawyerly opinion holds copyright. Still, I'm not entirely sure his fight with wiki is all that prudent...but then again, before reading about this I'd never heard of him. Now I have.
If you do an internet search, you'll find a ton of similar articles, but here are a couple links that will probably not expire too quickly:
Monkey selfie sparks intellectual property debate (http://news.yahoo.com/can-a-monkey-hold-intellectual-property-175510235.html)
Wikimedia Won't Take Down This Photo Because a Monkey Took It (http://gizmodo.com/wikimedia-wont-take-down-this-photo-because-a-monkey-ow-1616874824)
The short version:
British pro photographer David Slater went into the jungle to photograph rare macaques, set up a camera and the macaques pressed the shutter button hundreds of times, resulting in a lot of useless pixels and a few money shots. (Hey, that's rather similar to my own photography style!)
Wikimedia refuses Mr. Slater's take-down requests, arguing that no copyright exists because a non-human pressed the shutter button. Wiki lists various sources, such as The Daily Mail and NBC News, so it is fairly clear that Mr. Slater himself did not offer up the photos but rather it seems they were poached from news web sites.
My FWIW take:
I side with Mr. Slater. He is the producer of the art and in my non-lawyerly opinion holds copyright. Still, I'm not entirely sure his fight with wiki is all that prudent...but then again, before reading about this I'd never heard of him. Now I have.