Well, there is at least some difference there, as you have intent and creative control, even if the process is partly random. The photographer in this case did not appear to intend or control the situation at all.
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My instinct is to say that the human photographer should hold the copyright, but Iām not quite sure why. Maybe because the monkey doesnāt have a legal standing? i.e. it canāt sue to protect its copyright, and I didnāt notice anyone using the pic trying to compensate the monkey.
OTOH, if ownership of the camera trumps operation of the camera, itāll only be a matter of time before you can no longer buy new cameras. Instead, theyāll all come with shrink-wrapped UELAs, granting you only a license to use the camera, of which the manufacturer will retain actual ownership, and thus copyright to any photos you may take with it.
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You may have intent, but you donāt have creative control, unless your creative control is water + something that moves. If that is sufficient creative control, the camera owner here can easily trump that by claiming a specific jungle locale + rhesus monkeys.
I think that here, as with the Oscar selfie, there is a plausible argument to be made that the camera owner is at least the co-author of the photograph. I think that Ellenās argument is stronger, as she assembled the subjects and it was her idea, but I think the camera-owner in this case has a decent chance of convincing a jury that he helped author the photograph.
Depends. Is the burger Mayor McCheese? Then you got no case.
NEXT!
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David Slater ought to cease his whining and take up a profession where he does not try to charge rents on photographs to which he does not own the copyright.
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Unless of course you upgrade to the Pro version of the cameraās license. At which point you retain the rights to your photographs and can use them commercially.
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I think this is characteristic of a worrying trend to erode the creativity requirement for copyright. It is not enough that a work was somehow generated in the course of your work or that copyright protection would be very valuable economically. It does not even matter if you put resources or work into it if that work wasnāt creative.
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What if I have my camera on a table and the burglar accidentally bumps into it and unintentionally takes a picture of himself? Does he own the copyright? The monkey certainly didnāt ātake a pictureā in the sense of intentionally creating an image.
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this sort of highly legalistic slicing and dicing is death to innovation. Artists use all kinds of devices to over come the bland and boring including capturing randomness and trying to trick themselves. Are we now going to have judges decide whether we own rights to our work depending on the exact nature of its production? Really, this canāt end well. the photo belongs to the guy because it was his situation that created it. Stop micromanaging artists. it is silly and, well, thatās enough.
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If he is marketing it as a Monkey Selfie then some/all of the value come from the monkey taking the picture (and thus the copyright). Question: Is wikipedia compensating the monkey?
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If the camera owner intentionally tricked the monkey into taking the picture, then he would have an excellent case, but thatās not how he tells the story.
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[This laptop put your first para at the bottom of the screen, and at first glance I appreciated what I saw as the humour of your response: Iām in favour of whoever turns out to hold the rights to the picture.]
Iāve flip-flopped on this. Iāve been a photographer in a past life, and I appreciate the planning and effort without which these photographs couldnāt have been taken, and natural justice [that is to say, not the law] says he ought to be compensated for his part in the process.
On the other hand, he didnāt take the picture: and as referenced above, if somebody else chooses to take a photograph using my equipment without my intervention, why in law should I have any claim to the copyright?
On the gripping hand, if a wildlife photograph is automatically triggered, nobody would suggest assigning copyright to whichever animal came to the waterhole; this suggests to me that intent may-or-should [IANAL] be a deciding factor in assigning authorship to a work, so the human photographer may-or-should retain rights to whichever image results. [I would assume here that thereās no intent on the part of the monkey to take a selfie, although the image might suggest otherwise.] On the Watchmaker hand, an automatically triggered waterhole-photograph has been not only intended, but specifically constructed to be created under certain conditions; whereas here not only is there no mention of intent, thereās no technical planning at all: the photographer neither intended nor facilitated the photograph. Soā¦
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What if he just bought the monkey?
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What I meant was the law should err in favor of the artist and try to avoid turning it into a philosophical debate. No one else was around who might take credit. The photo belongs to the guy who made it possible. As artists we donāt need to understand how we do it and I wonāt cotton to some bozo who is not an artist telling me otherwise.
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The law should favor the artist, which is the monkey.
You say no-one else was around, but the monkey was around. You are assuming the monkey is a non-person with no legal standing. This may be true, but it might not be true. If Corporations Are People Too, and weāre handing out legal personhood like candy, then maybe the monkey gets some too?
There are some countries that have already decided that yes, non-humans have property rights. Like corporate personhood, itās a strange stance but done for a reason (often so that the animals can have an advocate in development proceedings that affect them), but itās kind of new and probably pretty grey.
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You can delegitimize my opinion all you want, but you will have to understand that this bozo is not impressed. Thank God we do not leave that decision to artists alone. Feel free to believe that your opinion as an artist carries more weight than mine as a consumer of art, but donāt expect me to agree.
Well, then thatās our disagreement right there. I think the law should er on the side of less restriction. Recognizing and especially enforcing a copyright constitutes substantial Government interference and should be limited to cases where the conditions are clearly met.
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Letās be goal-oriented. Wikipedia apparently wants to use the image.
If we are going to stipulate that monkeys can own the rights to photos they create, then the monkey has to give Wikipedia permission to use the image, which I very much doubt he has done.
So, we have two possible cases.
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In the case where the camera-owner owns the image, Wikipedia cannot use it, because the camera-owner requests its removal.
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In the case where the monkey owns the image, Wikipedia still cannot use it, because the rights-holder has not given Wikipedia permission to use it.
I love the image, and I think itās great that itās on the page, and I enjoy that this has caused a lively debate about animal rights, but at the end of the day, the photo must be removed.
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He should have just signed the photo as R. Mutt before releasing itā¦
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This is not even wrong.
