Man v Beast: Legal battle finally settled

In a story that seems almost too unbelievable to be true, a photographer has settled a two-year legal battle against an animal rights group over a monkey “selfie” image captured on his camera.

This whole impressive caper started in 2011 when British nature photographer, David Slater travelled to Sulawesi, Indonesia, to capture images of the critically endangered Celebes crested macaques.

Slater spent a number of days with the monkeys gaining their trust and putting himself in the position to be able to closer to them, but he still had trouble capturing the images he had in his mind’s eye. The solution was to set up a tripod with a remote shutter release.

A curious monkey took advantage of the “toy” left out and started playing around with it, capturing hundreds of images – the vast majority blurry and out of focus. But there was one gem, an image that would later be referred to as the monkey selfie.

Upon returning from his trip, Slater licensed the image to Caters News Agency with the assumption that the copyright was obviously his. But his copyright claim was called into question, the image removed from the agency website, and instead uploaded to the multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, a site that only accepts media available under a free content license.

To add insult to injury, in 2015, the animal rights group PETA sued Slater on behalf of the 6-year-old monkey, arguing that copyright belongs to it. Despite the fact that the US Copyright Office and government disputed PETA’s claim, arguing that it was not possible to register the works of a monkey and that a monkey could not own copyright, PETA persisted.

The legal dispute nearly sent Slater broke with him considering giving up photography entirely in order to be a tennis coach or dog walker. However, he can now finally relax after PETA’s appeal was dismissed by appeal judges at a court in San Francisco. Slater however, agreed to donate 25% of all future revenue from images sales/licensing to registered charities “dedicated to protecting the welfare or habitat” of the monkey named Naruto.