Actually it’s very right.
Comments like this don’t contribute to the discussion.
I was a newspaper photographer and am now a lawyer (but I am not your lawyer, and I am not giving anyone legal advice), so I may not have the most objective opinion on this. With that being said, I think that under American copyright law (I have absolutely no knowledge of British law) the gentleman would own the copyright.
Here the photographer set up a camera which was triggered by the movement of an animal (albeit the depression of the shutter). Journalists of all ilk use this type of technique in a variety of circumstance: for instance, shuttle launches (when that was a thing) often involved many photographers using noise/sound triggers to fire their cameras. Would NASA own the copyright to these images? Here is one more: it is extremely common for National Geographic photographers to set up extensive remote controlled cameras which are actually triggered by the movement of animals. Good luck messing with their copyright on these pictures…
Personally, I would not feel comfortable making the argument that Mr. Slater was not the owner of the copyright in this instance, just as I would feel uncomfortable suggesting that a picture was in the public domain (or owned by the government) just because it was triggered by the sound from a shuttle launch and not an actual photographer pressing an actual button.
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If you really love art (which I doubt) you should protect the artists ability to gain from it. Your libertarian desires do not speak to me because Libertarians live in a fantasy world and could not actually thrive in the world they imagine. It is a mind game I am not the least interested in. That was my original point. Keep your philosophical debate away from my methods, which are grounded in practice and tradition.
I didn’t de-legitimize your opinion, I tried to. That is different, no? This is a debate.
Really? I wasn’t even sure you were serious. You obviously do not have an iron in this particular fire.
The problem is that your initial conception of copyright assumes that copyright must exist in the creation of a work. The law, however, doesn’t support this view.
If your dog shits on a canvas in a pattern you find interesting, you can’t claim copyright over the work just because you laid the canvas on the floor and fed the dog the food that it digested and excreted onto the canvas. You especially can’t claim copyright if you didn’t even intend for the dog to shit on the canvas in the first place.
You could, however, in my scenario, take a picture of the shit on the canvas and claim that copyright, but it’s not the same as the original work of shit on a canvas. But in the scenario of Slater and the monkey, he may own the original copy of the work, but cannot by the laws of the US or the UK, claim copyright over the work itself.
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Bingo. I vote for this as the winning analogy.
You are talking out of your hat about this. You realize that, I hope. And by the way someone actually schooled in law commenting just above you says exactly the opposite. So . . . there is that.
Let’s say a famous photographer steals a camera from another famous photographer, who bought the camera and a burger from a burglar selling monkeys. The monkey pressed the button but it was on a time delay and the shutter snapped when the burglar positioned the camera inside the famous photographer. IANAL, but my spidey senses are telling me that the civil laws of forfeiture require the monkey and the second photographer to sue the burglar and the first photographer for damages but the first photographer and the monkey can also claim DMCA and have the NSA and the FBI perform a process of discovery to determine the rightful ownership of the monkey and therefore the shutter and therefore the camera’s position at the time of the crime. Am I right?
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Art (protected by copyright) is my entire and sole livelyhood, so that’s at least one of your assumptions turning out false. If you think that the question of legal personhood has no place in the question of whether the monkey can be the copyright owner, then you should share why.
I suggested that the artist may be the monkey because it sounds like the camera owner did not set up the shots nor intend for those shots to be taken, and therefore lacks a creative claim. In contrast to the clear intention and action of national-geographic-style tripwire shots, his claim sounds like it may be more simply “I found this, and no-one else owns it, so I claim it”. If no-one else owns it, then sure, it’s his. But that’s a legal assumption that I would be curious to see tested. I would similarly consider it relevant how intentional the actions of the monkey were or weren’t.
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Oh man. If you are really concerned about animal rights you wouldn’t be wasting your time on this silly argument. This is exactly what I was talking about from the beginning. Play elsewhere, leave my methods and practice out of it.
By the way, Wiki’s claim is that no one owns the rights. Not that the monkey does. which any judge would laugh out of court.
I acknowledge your wildly out there opinion and duly note its radicalness. Happy?
They admit it is owned, and they do not have the permission of the owner. They can’t (honestly) say both that the guy doesn’t own the rights because the monkey does, and that they don’t need the monkey’s permission because monkeys don’t have rights.
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In regards to your implied assertion that a lawyer would know better than a perceived layperson on this particular topic, I humbly submit this for your review: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority.
Rather than listen to a self-proclaimed lawyer, let’s review the law:
17 U.S. Code § 101
“A work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. A work consisting of sounds, images, or both, that are being transmitted, is “fixed” for purposes of this title if a fixation of the work is being made simultaneously with its transmission.”
And then let’s review the account of the person claiming to own the copyright:
"’…when one hit the button.’
‘The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it.’
‘At first it scared the rest of them away but they soon came back - it was amazing to watch.’
‘He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn’t worked that out yet.’"
So at least according to US copyright law and his own account, the works weren’t intended to be created. They were created accidentally and not of his authorship. Hence, they don’t qualify for copyright. Copyright exists “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” by incentivizing artists to create works. There’s no incentive for monkey’s to create works that aren’t authorized or intended by the owner of the equipment. Attributing copyright to a person who didn’t create the work devalues every other artists’ actual work.
…so there’s that.
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Wow, more assumptions. So many. So wrong. You don’t need to try (and fail) to decypher my motivations so you can wander off attacking red herrings instead of the topic at hand.
My interest is in copyright law and how it might apply, how it might intersect with other laws, international complications, edge cases, grey areas, unintended consequences, etc. If you think that’s silly, then go you, but that’s a poor argument, and ignoring greyness of areas might someday work against you. By the way, I didn’t tell you that Wikipedia had copy rights to the image.
Will you two please keep your voices down. We don’t know who might be lurking on this thread.
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The water + movement model you described is essentially the same as attaching a camera to a helium ballon, letting it go, and recording the results as the balloon randomly wobbles and twirls its way upwards. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the person who thought up the idea and executed it (or even ‘just’ copied the idea, and executed it) owns the copyright to the resultant imagery. Even though they didn’t personally push the button. Which is why movie directors get Oscars and a share of the profits, while movie cameramen only get an hourly rate - the monkey gets peanuts.
If Slater had intentionally left his camera within reach of the monkey with the intent that the monkey would pick up the camera and start taking photos, then fairplay; the photos are his.
But he didn’t. It was, as Karl elegantly phrased it, an act of god.
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[quote=“timquinn, post:43, topic:38473, full:true”]
If you really love art (which I doubt) you should protect the artists ability to gain from it.[/quote]But that’s the thing. I maintain that there was no artist. A bystander, who happened to be a photographer, witnessed a really neat act of God. He did not take the picture, not even indirectly or without knowing how he did it. Inadvertently providing the camera is not enough.
[quote]Your libertarian desires do not speak to me because Libertarians live in a fantasy world and could not actually thrive in the world they imagine.[/quote]I am lots of things, probably including many you don’t like, but I am certainly no Libertarian.
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Neither did the owner of the camera, which is the actual point here.
It is really interesting how you conflate “the artist” with “the camera owner”. David Slater did not take the pictures in question. By his own narrative the pictures were an entirely unplanned and happy accident of a photography trip—presumably he took some actual photographs of his own on that trip—that he wanted capitalize on and exploit. Great. Wikimedia also wants to capitalize on and exploit those images.
David Slater may be an artist, but he is not the artist that created these photographs.
The argument that he was necessary carries no weight, otherwise photographic subjects which are themselves necessary to photographs would somehow have claim to copyright. But they do not. The person who manipulated the camera and clicked the shutter is the artist, and gets the copyright, not the camera owner.
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That still wouldn’t work. He would only own the picture if the monkey was doing “work made for hire” according to Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reed. He would have had to have owned the monkey for picture-taking purposes.
I am not a lawyer, but I slept in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
The difficulty is that the photographer’s own story ([as recorded in his interview at the time][1]) is that the monkey did the picture-taking.
There’s no reason why he would have needed his own finger directly on the shutter; had he, say, rigged a an IR trigger and left the camera as a ‘trap’ he would still be directing the operation(or even embarked on a “throwing a gopro to the monkeys, what will happen?” art project deliberately); but the origin story is that they were the unintentional result of an unplanned monkey interference with the equipment.
Notably, the US specifically rejects copyrights based on ‘sweat of the brow’ (works that may be arduous to assemble but do not possess creativity or originality) and his odds in the UK are somewhat unclear, though better than in the US. It’s undeniable that the commercially relevant labor involved was done by the photographer; but if that labor involved no sufficient creative element, that is legally unhelpful, though one may consider it to be an ethically salient point.
[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8615859/Monkey-steals-camera-to-snap-himself.html
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