Picture thanks to Wiki Commons
Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is in hot water over a selfie picture which a monkey took of itself when it stole an English nature photographer’s camera.
Wackypedia claims that since the monkey took the picture it is public domain and the picture does not belong to photojournalist David Slater, who owned the camera. It had put the pictures in its Wikimedia Commons and Slater claims that is costing him money.
The black macaca nigra monkey swiped the camera from Slater during a 2011 shoot in Indonesia and snapped tons of pictures, incWluding the selfie and others at issue.
Wikimedia said that it had received a takedown request from Slater, claiming that he owned the copyright to the photographs, but it did not agree.
The image has at times been removed from the Wikimedia Commons by various site editors and keeps coming back.
Slater said the picture should not be in the public domain. While a monkey pressed the button, but I did all the setting up.
Wikimedia said that to claim copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial contributions to the final image, and even then, they would only have copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image. This means that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls into the public domain.
