Monkey ©. Monkey don’t.
Naruto, a crested macaque in Indonesia, has no rights to the selfies he took on a nature photographer’s camera, according to the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court upheld a lower court’s previous ruling, which said, basically, that animals can’t file copyright infringement suits.
In 2011, Naruto, then 7 years old, snapped several photos of himself with a camera belonging to photographer David John Slater, who was on assignment in Indonesia.
Slater included Naruto’s photos in a book he published.
2015 lawsuit
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sued Slater and self-publishing company Blurb on Naruto’s behalf in 2015. The group argued that publishing and selling the photographs that the monkey took infringed on Naruto’s rights under the Copyright Act.
The defendants argued that, as a monkey, Naruto couldn’t own a copyright.
