Wild Selfie

U.S. judges have recently put an end to the legal battle over the selfie of Naruto, the Indonesian macaque who went viral more than ten years ago with a self-portrait. The court’s decision ruled in favor of Slater, the camera’s owner, and rejected the claims of PETA, a U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to animal rights, which had been advocating on behalf of the macaque.

This bizarre story began in 2011, when David Slater, a professional photographer, was in the forests of Indonesia to capture some of the most unique animal species. Upon encountering a troop of monkeys, he left his camera unattended for a few moments. That’s when a photogenic macaque named Naruto grabbed it and began taking hundreds of selfies. Some, as even the best Instagrammers experience, were blurry and out of focus, while others were nearly perfect. The photographer posted one of the photos on his blog, and the image immediately went viral. Based on a literal interpretation of U.S. copyright law, Wikimedia, the American company that owns the Wikipedia domain, decided to include the image in its Wikimedia Commons collection—a repository of over 20,000 public images and videos available to the public because they are free of copyright. According to U.S. law, in fact, the rights to a photo belong to its author—that is, the person who took it—and, in this case, that was a monkey. Salter objected to the free distribution of the image, which he considered to be his in every respect, and sparked a full-blown legal controversy regarding intellectual property: if a monkey takes a photo, who owns the photo?

Over the years, the issue has become increasingly complicated and increasingly absurd: PETA, already known for its provocative campaigns, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Naruto against Slater and also against Blurb, a publishing company that released the book *Wildlife Personalities*, which includes, among many other animal photos, one of Naruto.

Both Slater and Blurb filed a“motion to dismiss”: a legal document used in the U.S. legal system by defendants to argue that the lawsuit against them is flawed and based on non-existent 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 Slater, PETA cannot prove that the famous selfie was taken by Naruto himself and not by another monkey.

And, in fact, the judges ruled in his favor, determining that the rights to the selfie belong to him and not to the animal.

Despite this, however, PETA and David Slater have reached an agreement: the photographer will pay the nonprofit organization 25% of the revenue generated from his copyright on the photo.