First there was the selfie and then came the Monkey Selfie. Who can forget the series of selfies taken by the six-year-old crested macaque Naruto, who was singlehandedly responsible for the selfie evolution. A place which evens the selfie stick couldn\u2019t take. To jog you memory, here is a brief back ground- English photographer David John Slater, on a trip to the Indonesian National Park, had left his camera without any supervision. The camera landed in the hands of Naruto, the macaque, resulting in what could only be called a selfie phenomenon.<\/p>\n
The photographer subsequently went on to publish a book, for commercial use, containing the Monkey Selfies. The issue first arose when one of the images ended up on Wikimedia Commons, which has a policy of only publishing public domain works or works permitted to be distributed under the Creative Commons license. According to them, the Monkey Selfie was very much a work in the public domain. Mr. Slater sent them a takedown notice alleging his copyright claim over the image. However, Wikimedia refused to take down the image, resulting in a suit lost by Mr. Slater.<\/p>\n
Now, the Monkey Selfie is back and this time it\u2019s PETA (meaning People for Ethical Treatment of Animals and not People Eating Tasty Animals) suing Mr. Slater, claiming that the author of the selfie is Naturo and that \u201cNaruto should be afforded the protection of a claim of ownership, and the right to recover damages and other relief for copyright infringement\u201d. According to the plaint PETA states that the selfies were a result of the \u201cpurposeful and voluntary actions\u201d by Naruto, without any external supervision, therefore the original work should be rightfully owned by Naruto and not Slater.<\/p>\n
PETA\u2019s logic, clearly stated in the plaint, is that if the photo was taken by a human he would be allowed to claim authorship over the photograph and be entitled to all benefits from the copyright in it. They further assert that \u201cunder the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. \u00a7 101 et seq.<\/em>, is sufficiently broad so as to permit the protections of the law to extend to any original work, including those created by Naruto\u201d. \u00a0Adding to the foregoing, PETA added that all the proceeds from the sale, licensing or any other commercial use of the Monkey Selfies should be used for the benefit of Naruto, his family, his community and for the betterment of his surroundings.<\/p>\n Going by the US law the only requirement to claim ownership over a work, is that there should be an author. However, for all practical purposes such author should be human. Section 202.02(b) of the\u00a0Compendium II of Copyright Office Practices further states that \u201cThe term “authorship” implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable.\u201d<\/p>\n Now coming to the Indian law. The Indian Copyright Act, 1957 states that an author of a photograph is the \u2018person\u2019 taking the photograph. As far as the meaning of \u2018person\u2019 goes,\u00a0Jurisprudentially the meaning includes a legal or natural person (meaning human). Further, Section 3 (39) of the General Clauses Act, 1897 says that the meaning of \u2018person\u2019 includes \u201ccompany or association or body of individuals, whether incorporated or not.”<\/p>\n Even though there is recognition given to the fact that certain animals are intelligent \u2018non-human person\u2019, as stated by the Ministry of Environment and Forests about Dolphins, this statement cannot be exaggerated. Animals are treated as persons in certain cases, but this is purely to protect them.<\/p>\n Considering the aforementioned, it is safe to say that our monkey friend probably will not find solace anytime soon.<\/p>\n Authored by Anchita Sharma<\/p>\n References –here<\/a>, here<\/a>,here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Monkey Selfie case raises significant questions about authorship and copyright law in the context of animal-created works. Analysing both US and Indian statutes, the post concludes that animals are not entitled to copyright ownership under current law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":22,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[7482,93,917,5,7484,7481,7483,573],"class_list":["post-29870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyrights","category-intellectual-property","tag-animal-rights","tag-copyright-law","tag-indian-copyright-act","tag-intellectual-property","tag-legal-authorship","tag-monkey-selfie","tag-naruto-lawsuit","tag-peta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29870"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133385,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29870\/revisions\/133385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}