Texas Not a pretty picture: Thoughts on the "monkey selfie" debacle: Is Wikimedia taking the right approach?← Back to ContentsView Latest Issue20 January 2016 Editor's note: This image posted without the consent of the author, photographer, or monkey.
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Very well-said; I do recall that Slater said that he was previously making some money off the photograph before the debacle. There's really no point forcing a sole photographer to fight a court battle over a scenario that will likely have no impact on copyright use on Wikipedia at all. (Not to mention that the photograph itself isn't exactly essential) It just seems like the Wikimedia Foundation pushing its weight around and ignoring the human in the situation. Opencooper (talk) 19:58, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) There are various things that can be said:
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:02, 24 January 2016 (UTC).[reply]
I blogged about this issue, from my standpoint as both a photographer and animal rights activist, after reading about it in the Signpost last year. I still believe that neither Slater nor PETA (the group filing the lawsuit, which I basically detest and have no affiliation with) were acting entirely in good faith. But the reasoning in this article for ultimately removing the photos from Commons is reasonable and persuasive. Funcrunch (talk) 21:41, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This is spot-on correct and, if anything, is on the conservative side. This is no different than a live sporting event. Slater rented the venue and photographed wildlife with the explicit intent of creating photographs for his business. If this was at a football match or baseball game and the monkey pressed the record button, the rights to the recording are not magically transformed into "public domain." The match in question is unscripted just like the photo in dispute but there is no dispute that the account of the match or game belongs to the team or league regardless of who presses the record button. "My monkey took the photo so that means I have the right to broadly copy and release it" is not going to fly and I expect the Premier League, MLB and NFL will all agree that venue and intent are much more important than outcome. Their amicus briefs will strongly favor the rights of Mr. Slater to control the intellectual property that resulted from his endeavor and not the "public domain" argument put forth by Commons. A "monkey defense" will be quashed as the monkey is not the one responsible for unlicensed distribution. --DHeyward (talk) 04:15, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This is an excellent article. Combined with the automated harvesting of Flickr images whose creators (possibly inadvertently) posted under CC licenses but never authorised Wikimedia to republish - including many of an obviously personal nature and/or with no encyclopaedic value, there are real issues with the way Wikimedia treats photographers' moral rights. Nick-D (talk) 23:02, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Some questions
Do (1), (2), (3), (4), (7), (8), and (9) actually matter as far as copyright ownership? A lot of sources say no. Nor does it matter that Mr. Slater "slowly built a trustful, friendly relationship" with the monkeys.
(5) probably matters, since that does come under the "creative input" that copyright requires. But isn't the point of the whole "monkey selfie" situation that Mr. Slater didn't actually select a particular creature to be photographed, the monkey did? He went to where monkeys were with a camera, yes, but the early interviews (before this blew up into a huge copyright battle) report Mr. Slater as saying that "[h]e left the equipment for a few moments and when he returned one of the creatures was, well, monkeying around with it."[3][4] His story seems to have changed since those early interviews, of course, claiming that he planned for the monkey to snap the picture and that he arranged everything to the point that the monkey just activated a remote trigger, versus the early interviews where it was played as accidental that the monkey grabbed and activated an unattended camera and fortuitous that a few of the hundreds of photos turned out well.
And (6) might matter, but from some cursory searching that seems to be a question that has been debated back and forth in a lot of legal battles as to what extent adjusting settings on the camera (#6, which Mr. Slater presumably did) versus arranging the subject, framing the image, and choosing the moment to snap the picture (#5, which Mr. Slater didn't do) matter. This could be compared to art by elephants: someone chose the paints and brushes and elephant and put them all together (#6), yes, but the elephant actually created it (#5).
Another thing to consider would be whether whatever cropping or digital manipulation Mr. Slater might have done to the raw photographs to produce the final images released are sufficient creative input for copyright protection. I suspect that really answering that would require that the originals versus the edited images would have to be submitted as evidence at some point, at which point we could take the originals before Mr. Slater's edits and restart the rest of the debate.
OTOH, a lot of the debate here seems to really be about some sort of "moral" right rather than actual legal right, despite being discussed as if it were a legal right. And there we're well into the realm of opinions rather than facts. Anomie⚔ 22:19, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The claim that this is a trivial issue we should let go is dangerous: If a photographer has rights even with no creative decisions, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. would surely be wrong. And that would affect thousands of images. So, yes, it's probably worth defending that line in the sand, given what ignoring it opens up challenge to. Adam Cuerden (talk) 23:13, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Slater's in the right on this, and the behavior of some elements of our community on the matter are shameful
Disclaimer: I'm am not a lawyer. But I worked as a policy analyst amid a team of top-notch public interest intellectual property (fair use), freedom of expression and civil liberties attorneys at a non-profit public interest group for about a decade, so I'm well schooled in this stuff.
There is not a chance in hell that any court will determine that the monkey owns the copyright, nor that there isn't one. The copyright is very clearly that of Slater. This case is totally indistinguishable from an artist creating a painting by dipping worms in different colors of paint and putting them on a canvas (and, yes, that's been done, and the works are not copyrighted by worms).
Per WP:COPYRIGHT, these images should be removed from WMF servers immediately, because our taking and republishing them is unethical, and it opens the foundation to legal action for no real reason other than some editors think the images are nice, and another pack of editors has a kooky version of animal rights advocacy they want to campaign about disruptively. Lots of images are nice, but that doesn't give us the right to steal them, and Wikipedia (along with other WMF projects) must not be used for soapboxing some special-interest.
I'm a very firm supporter of open content, and an opponent of copyright extension and other intellectual property land-grabs by industry (including algorithm, software, and genome patents; and attempts to broadly trademark generic words and common names). But I'm also a strong proponent of not being a big pack of WP:DICKs, ripping off an individual just to try to make a point that is puerile and ignorant, verging on willfully stupid. If anyone thinks this is incivil, see WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE: When you are being a direct threat to the reputation and financial viability of the project, you will be called on it. I think some indefinite blocks are in order for WP:NOTHERE transgression of key legal policies. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:44, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
We need to hear the monkey's views on this matter. GoodDay (talk) 23:36, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Is this intended to be some sort of parody? Why bother running an op-ed and then illustrate it with the monkey-selfie just to point out what Epic fail the entire piece is? Alsee (talk) 11:26, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sitting here sipping on a beer and I'm feeling quite uneasy. Was I swindled by the brewer who, according to what I am reading here, merely set the production stage and then processed/packaged the final result? Should I have compensated the yeast directly since they did all of the work? This is quite a moral quandary for me, as I have drank a lot of beer in my life (and no small amount this fine night). In efforts to rectify the situation, I would like to set up a trust fund for the offspring of all those yeast involved - are there any lawyers here who would be willing to advise on how to go about setting up the account? EditorFormerlyKnownAsPuddin' (talk) 04:47, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]