Wild Selfie
US judges recently settled the legal battle over the selfie of Naruto, the Indonesian macaque whose self-portrait went viral online more than a decade ago. The court's decision ruled in favor of Slater, the camera's owner, and rejected the claims of PETA, an American animal rights nonprofit, which supported the macaque's cause.
The bizarre story begins in 2011, when David Slater, a professional photographer, was in the forests of Indonesia to immortalize some of the most unusual animal species. He came across a troop of monkeys and left his camera unattended for a few moments. Then a photogenic macaque, Naruto, grabbed it and began taking hundreds of selfies. Some, as is often the case with even the best Instagrammers, were blurry and out of focus, while others were nearly perfect. The photographer posted one of the photos on his Instagram account. blog The image immediately went viral. Based on a literal interpretation of US copyright law, Wikimedia, the American company that owns the Wikipedia domain, then decided to include the image in its Wikimedia Commons content collection, a collection of over 20,000 public images and videos, accessible to the public because they are free of copyright. According to US law, the rights to a photo belong to its author, the person who took it, and in this case, it was a monkey. Salter opposed the free dissemination of the image, which he believed to be his in every respect, sparking a full-blown legal controversy over intellectual property: if a monkey takes a photo, whose photo is it?
Over the years, the issue has become increasingly complicated and increasingly absurd: PETA, already known for its provocative battles, has sued, on behalf of Naruto, Slater and also Blurb, a publishing house that published the book Wildlife Personalities, which contains, among many animal photos, one of Naruto.
Both Slater and Blurb have filed a motion for dismissal : a document used in the US legal system by defendants to explain that the lawsuit against them is flawed and based on nonexistent grounds. In this document, Slater wrote, among other things, that " the only relevant fact in this case is that the plaintiff is a monkey suing for copyright infringement ." According to Salter, PETA cannot prove that the famous selfie was taken by Naruto and not another monkey.
And, in fact, the judges agreed with him, ruling that the rights to the selfie belong to him and not to the animal.
Despite this, however, the organization Peta and David Slater have reached an agreement: the photographer will pay the non-profit organization 25% of the proceeds from his copyright on the photo.