In the Public Domain?

A Celebes Black Crested Macaque took a selfie of itself using photographer David Slater’s camera.

Look familiar!?

Yes! There is only about 1% difference in the DNA of macaques and humans! Well, maybe even less considering the accelerating Devolution of our species!

And social media in general and my blog in particular may be a testimony to that for sure!

What About the Monkey Copyright Dispute?

The monkey selfie copyright dispute is a series of disputes about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater. The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater’s objections that he holds the copyright, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright.

Slater has argued that he has a valid copyright claim, as he engineered the situation that resulted in the pictures by travelling to Indonesia, befriending a group of wild macaques, and setting up his camera equipment in such a way that a “selfie” picture might come about. The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2014 refusal to remove the pictures from its Wikimedia Commons image library was based on the understanding that copyright is held by the creator, that a non-human creator (not being a legal person cannot hold copyright, and that the images are thus in the public domain.

Wikipedia