Cases like these are not-uncommon in the animal rights movement. Activists are trying to establish legal precedents that can be used to establish meaningful animal cruelty laws; the ones we have now are not adequate. These guys do some excellent work. Although sometimes some of the things PETA does seem silly, I am quite certain they know exactly what they are doing.
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I have no idea if this particular legal battle is yet another PETA publicity stunt or an actual attempt toward gaining legal rights for animals, but thought I’d use the opportunity to explain that there is a legit movement toward animals having legal rights.
My opinion of them is very low so I favor the publicity stunt theory. When I was in college at Tulane, a school famed for its psychology research, PETA’s student organization was attempting to stop the euthanization of a research monkey who so clearly needed to be put down. They had their points, but still to me it boiled down to them stopping this monkey - who had basically been tortured from the time he was born - from receiving the only humane thing we could give him at this point in his miserable life, which was escape from the constant pain he had to endure due to all the abuse he had had as a research subject.) One of the PETA groups members explained the whole case to me and admitted that they were using the sad image of this research monkey to promote their own agenda. So they cared as little for this individual monkey as the researchers who had so abused him.
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If PETA prevails here, it’s going to mean getting a model release form filled out every time you want to document nature. And then there’ll be the lawyers who insist they represent the animals’ best interests. Talk about Monkey Business!
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There should be no copyright here, since there was no creative act done.
Incidentally, if a monkey finds a gun and accidentally pulls the trigger killing a human, it should not be tried and incarcerated either. Because it’s a monkey and human laws only apply to humans.
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there are precedents:
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Based on actual cases. A very sexy movie, too - good date night movie.
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You’re gonna have to unpack this one for me.
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[quote=“pies, post:64, topic:82836”]There should be no copyright here, since there was no creative act done.
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I beg to disagree.
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Copyright is supposed to cover creative works. Creative work is the result of a creative effort. My assumption is that an effort has to be directed in order for its result to be a creative work.
In other words, my view is that if a child, or indeed any animal, presses a button on a camera without knowing what it does, it does not constitute a creative effort, and therefore does not result in a creative work. It creates a random photograph that might, by accident, be interesting to the viewer.
If, on the other hand, you purposefully give a child a camera and try to have it press the shutter, it does constitute a creative effort on your part and the result would, in my view, be copyrightable.
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Would you say that if you fall into a cave by accident, you can still call it a spelunking expedition? 
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I support the monkey, and this dolphin that wanted to borrow an iPad.
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Thanks for articulating that. I see your point now and I can’t see any reason to disagree with it. ‘Creative effort’ is the one criterion for copyright eligibility that’s a bit squirrelly. Plenty of ‘happy accidents’ can happen during the creative process. Some are expected (many illustrators love watercolor for its unpredictability), some are are a consequence of mistakes, and a rare few occur as if they were miracles.
What unifies these events under ‘creative’, I suppose, is that they occur as consequences of effort whose motivation is to create.
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I see it similarly, but not quite the same as @pies:
The goal of copyright is to incentivize creativity. That is, if you create something, you have the exclusive right to monetize it, so people will have a reason to create as an alternative to making ends meet by, for instance, working at a retail store.
So, it’s not that you’re deliberately trying to create something specific, it’s that you’re deliberately trying to do something creative, and one of your incentives, even if it’s not the only one or even the primary one, is that you may be able to monetize your creativity.
Without any expectation of monetizing your creativity, the idea of copyright is meaningless.
Since a macaque has no concept of monetizing an act of creative work, copyright should not apply.
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I’m struggling for words right now because too many of them are rushing my mind at once. In the meantime, I suggest you read about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a brilliant, conclusive articulation of why artists do what they do.
Oh, I’m well aware. I’ve done some acting for zero compensation, and some writing, for which monetary gain was (maybe) #5 on the list of reasons why I did it.
I’m not saying that artists create due to an expectation of monetization. I’m saying that the goal of copyright is to incentivize more creation, by both providing a reward for people who do so, and by taking financial pressure off of successful creators so that they can provide further acts of creation.
When determining how to apply a law, you should take into account its purpose. the purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity. If it doesn’t do so in this case (and it would take extraordinary evidence to make me believe that a macaque understands the idea of even copying a creative work, much less an exclusive right to do so), why should it apply?
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If I understand you correctly: attribution (a creative concept) can be granted to the macaque but copyright (a legal concept) cannot.
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I… think so? The macaque is the creator of the work, no question there. Whether it knew the picture would be recorded more permanently on the screen when it pressed the button… I’m not familiar enough with any of this to give a yea or nay on that one. So I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and grant full authorship: I’d concede that perhaps it pressed that button with the full intention of capturing a picture of itself, although it may grasp those concepts very differently than we do.
But no, I don’t think that it should be eligible for a copyright on that photo, even if it did understand exactly what pushing that button did.
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