The Verge: Just when you thought you wouldn’t hear about the monkey selfie ever again, the legal saga lives once more. Although the parties — the photographer, a self-publishing book company, and PETA, on behalf of the selfie-taking monkey — reached a settlement in September of last year, the Ninth Circuit is now refusing to dismiss the case. This means the court will be coming out with an official appellate decision about the monkey selfie.
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Some things never die. I am going to be interested in reading the opinion of the 9th circuit over the matter of the monkey selfie to see what they conclude. I do hope it is a slap in the face to PETA so hard that it stings them for years. A waste of the courts time (and taxpayer dollars since this in federal court) for PETA to have brought this action at all. Who speaks for the monkey? Well, it turns out no one can, except the monkey. The court, in continuing to issue a ruling on the matter, is setting a precedent already. You can’t settle out of court with the parties if not all parties are represented. That was the argument made by the court in continuing the matter. Since PETA didn’t actually represent the monkey, they could not settle on the monkeys behalf. This of course will change a lot of things in terms of copyright, ownership claims and whether it is the person taking the photo or the subject of the photo who owns the rights to the image. Now we wait and see.
To give a brief update on what caused all of this ruckus in the courts, “Back in 2011, nature photographer David Slater left some camera equipment out in the Indonesian rainforest. By Slater’s account, an enterprising Sulawesi crested macaque — since identified by anthropologist Antje Engelhardt of the Macaca Nigra Project as the monkey known as “Naruto” — picked up a camera and took a selfie.” And while it went viral there came up the issue of who owned the photo. I feel like the only reason that this will continue is so that there actually will be some strong case law on the subject. This will hopefully go far enough that we will actually have some case law to clarify this issue moving forward. Because as we progress in the future I feel that this may come up more often, and having some clear lines to guide us will be useful.
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