No Monkey Business; Copyright Issue over Monkey Selfie

A series of selfies taken by a monkey has led to a copyright dispute between Wikipedia and a British wildlife photographer.

The popular self-portraits in question were taken by a crested black macaque on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 2011.

British photographer David Slater was on the island to click some pictures of the monkeys. During the shoot, however, macaques decided to get take some selfies instead and started clicking the camera button.

"They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button," Slater told The Telegraph in 2011. "The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn't worked that out yet."

But, one self-image in particular was perfect. This monkey selfie has gone viral and has been shared by several social media users.

Slater has now claimed that he owns the selfie and wants Wikimedia Foundation to take down the picture. Wikimedia has instead decided to side with the monkeys and says that the photo is uncopyrightable.

"This [image] is in the public domain, because as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested," said Wikipedia's group of editors, according to the Time.

Slater maintains that he owns the photograph since the monkeys used his camera to click the image. "That trip cost me about £2,000 for that monkey shot. ... Photography is an expensive profession that's being encroached upon. They're taking our livelihoods away," he said, according to The Guardian.

Legal experts say that Slater might lose the case if he decides to drag Wikimedia to court. "If a monkey takes a picture, that can be considered an author's intellectual creation. The fact that [David Slater] owns the camera has nothing to do with it," Charles Swan of the London-based Swan Turton law firm told Time.

 Swan cited another example of a copyright issue of a selfie or rather a usie clicked by actor Bradley Cooper at the Oscars. Ellen DeGeneres posted the image on her twitter account, but Cooper was the one who took the image. Mary M. Luria, an intellectual property specialist and partner at Davis & Gilbert LLP in New York City says that in the star-studded Oscar selfie, Cooper would be the natural copyright holder since he clicked the image, The Time repors.