10 ms·

Who holds the copyright to a picture taken by a monkey?

92 points by civilian 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago
You so want the answer to this to be "the monkey", but because of our humanocentric maleocracy, the answer is "nobody".
- orblivion 15y ago
  Well, we don't hand out rights to animals who aren't smart enough to understand them. The monkey was smart enough to use the camera, I dunno...
  - regularfry 15y ago
    Ooh, that's a dangerous line of thought. We certainly do respect rights of people who aren't smart enough to understand them; we also protect the welfare of animals in other ways despite their not being able to comprehend that we generally choose to treat their health and comfort as a "right". The personhood horizon doesn't lie on a speciation boundary, and "rights" as extended by us go much further.
- mooism2 15y ago
  If the answer is "the monkey", can the monkey meaningfully consent for the photo to be reproduced on the internet, in newspapers, etc? Are we content when everyone reproduces the photo without permission?
  - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    If the answer is that the monkey owns the rights, then it's very similar to the "orphan works" problem in copyright where items are lost to society because the owner cannot be traced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works At the moment we seem content to let all this stuff fall through the cracks of history simply to strengthen copyright protection of big business.
maeon3 15y ago
Animals won't have rights until we can objectively prove that they are conscious and sentient just as we are. Probably 20 years or so.
- rms 15y ago
  Just in time for lab grown meat!
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  At which point does a critter stop being sentient? I could easily accept a proof (that I couldn't understand or verify without years of study) claiming that a chimpanzee is sentient; I doubt I could be convinced that a mouse is sentient; and the yeast on top of my fridge is certainly not sentient, unless it mutates into some sort of collective.
  - novumordo 15y ago
    >I doubt I could be convinced that a mouse is sentient Having met plenty of humans and plenty of mice, there are definitely members of the former who are less sentient than members of the latter. I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly, but we should not be judging the sentience of creatures by the degree of ignorance we have. How would you react to a proof that the yeast on top of your fridge is indeed sentient?
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      > we should not be judging the sentience of creatures by the degree of ignorance we have. Considering that we're usually unaware of our degree of ignorance about nearly everything, this evaluates to "we should not be judging anything since we may be ignorant about it". Which is obviously bullshit, because it would just put us in a deadlock about any decision. And I'd probably be fairly shocked, and then I'd hope that I didn't do anything to piss it off, or to infringe on any rights I would presume it to have - which I would assume to be the same ones that I have.
- michaeldhopkins 15y ago
zach 15y ago
Gotta agree the comment on the article by acitrano - they probably do own copyright to the picture, but to reveal why outside of court would needlessly undermine the trope which has made it famous. Indeed, I presume that surfacing "the legal angle" was a motivation for sending lawyer letters in the first place. After this press hit and the "bird absconding with camera" video, I'm sure there are a lot of wheels turning about how to spin another viral play on animals "stealing" products to use themselves. You won't have to wait long to see the next one.
Cushman 15y ago
As one commenter points out, it's actually pretty reasonable to give copyright to the owner of the camera— Who owns copyright on the abstract art produced when my Roomba knocks my paints over on the canvas? Another points out it's not really different from the common practice of wildlife trap photography; the monkey wasn't "trying" to take a picture, it just triggered the mechanism accidentally. Arguing that the owner of the camera shouldn't have copyright because he didn't intend to take the picture seems highly dangerous to me— you're throwing out a lot of photography there.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  Correct. Most people who give a camera to a monkey do so with the intent that a picture is taken. Another issue that is often omitted is "selection". Most photographers take thousands of photos and then choose only a few picks. This selection process is every bit as creative (if not more) as pointing a camera at some subject and pressing a button. A picture taken by a monkey is rarely the only picture -- most of the interesting pictures that were not taken by photographers themselves are actually the rare few in long series of misses. The fact that a photographer was smart enough to choose "the one" hit should be rewarded. Finally, the "copyrightability", believe it or not, is subtly determined by who the artist is, as was demonstrated countless times by pop art stars such as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Since we here are gentlemen of precision so to speak, think of it this way: there is an "intent" factor X which is multiplied by the "stature" factory Y (meaning stature of the artist/photographer in the art world -- terribly hard to determine, I know), which results in some "copyrightability" value Z. It is incredibly unfair to the lesser known artists of course, but such is the nature of fame and art. It's a winner-takes-all world.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    >Most people who give a camera to a monkey do so with the intent that a picture is taken. Not what happened here: "David Slater has already admitted that the monkeys found a camera he had left out by accident and that he did not have anything to do with setting up the shot." >The fact that a photographer was smart enough to choose "the one" hit should be rewarded. Then, are the other pictures not copyrighted?
nicker 15y ago
At TechDirt <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110713/11244515079/can-we-subpoena-monkey-why-monkey-self-portraits-are-likely-public-domain.shtml&#62 http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110713/11244515079/can-we...; they argue that by default the photos are in the public domain. We don't want to fall into the trap of assuming everything must have some copyright owner.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
onan_barbarian 15y ago
I await the resolution of this problem eagerly, so we can establish a precedent for the copyright on _code_ written by monkeys.
- techiferous 15y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8S7QxpjeY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8S7QxpjeY
yters 15y ago
The owners who set up the experiment. Or if it's just fooling around with stuff, then nobody. The monkey isn't capable of rational decision making so it can't be responsible.
drallison 15y ago
Suppose there were an AI program that could write short stories indistinguishable from those produced by a human. Further assume that the AI operates independently of any human control and generates stories using rules it has discovered by "reading" human stories using machine learning. The creative process used by the machine is not unlike that used by a human. Does the law preclude stories created in that fashion from being copyright? And if they can be copyright, who is the author?
- wisty 15y ago
  If a human purposely set the chain in motion, it's presumably the human's. If you made an AI with no intention to create literature, then its work would be uncopyrightable (public domain?). That's why your binaries are copyright, but the monkey's accidental photographs are not. If you write a chat bot, which interacts with (and learns with) other humans, it might be more interesting.
yason 15y ago
This discussion is a great point demonstrating the utter absurdity of copyright itself. As soon as people start arguing whether the monkey, the monkey owner, or the photographer has some rights to the photo that was taken, someone ought to bring in the sanity and everyone's feet back to ground. Nature itself doesn't seem to reflect on intellectual property: it does so with physical property. If the monkey had stolen the photographer's picture, it would make sense to argue that the picture belongs to him and he deserves to get it back. That's all natural and simply manifests in the photographer no longer possessing the picture as soon as the monkey had stolen it. But, for intellectual property there is no natural manifestation that is observable. There are just endless semantic arguments about what it means to own rights to something. In the end, the picture taken by the monkey just is. There's nothing more to that.
- Meai 15y ago
  Your argument broken down goes like this: "If you can't touch it, it isn't natural, therefore disregard it" First of all, what is "natural" or not does not matter. What nature does should not be measure to what we do. I see no reason for that, just because 'nature' has a positive connotation nowadays, doesn't make it a logical end to strive for. "Natural" is a contrived word, and to further elaborate on this completely nonsense word and draw consequences like say "it's invalid" or "it's wrong" because of a self-proclaimed lack of the attribute you call natural, is even more so not understandable. If I may provoke a comparison, you argue with the mind of the so called 'pro-life' proponents. That is a very simplistic view of the world. Just because my idea (=photo e.g) isn't immediately transferable to physical properties, doesn't mean it's any less "real" or "natural". If I tell a guy my idea, and he implements it trivially with huge profit, then the loss is very real to me. Your naive views translate very well into the last sentence: "the picture taken by the monkey just is". You don't appear to have any will to solve the issue at hand. That's like giving up to solve the problem at all.
  - dhume 15y ago
    Your argument broken down goes like this: "If you can't touch it, it isn't natural, therefore disregard it" It's more of an acknowledgment that our concept of ownership is derived from the scarcity of the objects we may own. Whether the thing over which someone claims ownership is natural doesn't enter into it. You don't appear to have any will to solve the issue at hand. I don't think GP is convinced there is a genuine issue at hand.
deathwarmedover 15y ago
Do Creative Commons licenses cover non-humans?
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  No license covers non-humans in the way I think you're implying, they don't exist as legal entities in any way that would allow them to the required legal rights. (Note I'm not saying that the law doesn't recognise their existence at all - it obviously does in many ways - just that they don't have the same rights as a human in terms of making contracts, owning property and so on).
evilswan 15y ago
It's cre-ape-tive commons. :D
- evilswan 15y ago
  Woah - downvote, just because it's not funny! Bit harsh.
  - jokermatt999 15y ago
    Attempts at humor typically get downvoted at Hacker News. HN is more interested in discussion than humor, so it's downvoted as noise.
    - evilswan 15y ago
      Point taken.
ZeroGravitas 15y ago
Nice to see it's already been added to the relevant page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque

92 points by civilian 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

You so want the answer to this to be "the monkey", but because of our humanocentric maleocracy, the answer is "nobody".

orblivion 15y ago
Well, we don't hand out rights to animals who aren't smart enough to understand them. The monkey was smart enough to use the camera, I dunno...
- regularfry 15y ago
  Ooh, that's a dangerous line of thought. We certainly do respect rights of people who aren't smart enough to understand them; we also protect the welfare of animals in other ways despite their not being able to comprehend that we generally choose to treat their health and comfort as a "right". The personhood horizon doesn't lie on a speciation boundary, and "rights" as extended by us go much further.
mooism2 15y ago
If the answer is "the monkey", can the monkey meaningfully consent for the photo to be reproduced on the internet, in newspapers, etc? Are we content when everyone reproduces the photo without permission?
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  If the answer is that the monkey owns the rights, then it's very similar to the "orphan works" problem in copyright where items are lost to society because the owner cannot be traced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works At the moment we seem content to let all this stuff fall through the cracks of history simply to strengthen copyright protection of big business.

maeon3 15y ago

Animals won't have rights until we can objectively prove that they are conscious and sentient just as we are. Probably 20 years or so.

rms 15y ago
Just in time for lab grown meat!
pavel_lishin 15y ago
At which point does a critter stop being sentient? I could easily accept a proof (that I couldn't understand or verify without years of study) claiming that a chimpanzee is sentient; I doubt I could be convinced that a mouse is sentient; and the yeast on top of my fridge is certainly not sentient, unless it mutates into some sort of collective.
- novumordo 15y ago
  >I doubt I could be convinced that a mouse is sentient Having met plenty of humans and plenty of mice, there are definitely members of the former who are less sentient than members of the latter. I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly, but we should not be judging the sentience of creatures by the degree of ignorance we have. How would you react to a proof that the yeast on top of your fridge is indeed sentient?
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    > we should not be judging the sentience of creatures by the degree of ignorance we have. Considering that we're usually unaware of our degree of ignorance about nearly everything, this evaluates to "we should not be judging anything since we may be ignorant about it". Which is obviously bullshit, because it would just put us in a deadlock about any decision. And I'd probably be fairly shocked, and then I'd hope that I didn't do anything to piss it off, or to infringe on any rights I would presume it to have - which I would assume to be the same ones that I have.
michaeldhopkins 15y ago

zach 15y ago

Gotta agree the comment on the article by acitrano - they probably do own copyright to the picture, but to reveal why outside of court would needlessly undermine the trope which has made it famous. Indeed, I presume that surfacing "the legal angle" was a motivation for sending lawyer letters in the first place. After this press hit and the "bird absconding with camera" video, I'm sure there are a lot of wheels turning about how to spin another viral play on animals "stealing" products to use themselves. You won't have to wait long to see the next one.

Cushman 15y ago

As one commenter points out, it's actually pretty reasonable to give copyright to the owner of the camera— Who owns copyright on the abstract art produced when my Roomba knocks my paints over on the canvas? Another points out it's not really different from the common practice of wildlife trap photography; the monkey wasn't "trying" to take a picture, it just triggered the mechanism accidentally. Arguing that the owner of the camera shouldn't have copyright because he didn't intend to take the picture seems highly dangerous to me— you're throwing out a lot of photography there.

bluekeybox 15y ago
Correct. Most people who give a camera to a monkey do so with the intent that a picture is taken. Another issue that is often omitted is "selection". Most photographers take thousands of photos and then choose only a few picks. This selection process is every bit as creative (if not more) as pointing a camera at some subject and pressing a button. A picture taken by a monkey is rarely the only picture -- most of the interesting pictures that were not taken by photographers themselves are actually the rare few in long series of misses. The fact that a photographer was smart enough to choose "the one" hit should be rewarded. Finally, the "copyrightability", believe it or not, is subtly determined by who the artist is, as was demonstrated countless times by pop art stars such as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Since we here are gentlemen of precision so to speak, think of it this way: there is an "intent" factor X which is multiplied by the "stature" factory Y (meaning stature of the artist/photographer in the art world -- terribly hard to determine, I know), which results in some "copyrightability" value Z. It is incredibly unfair to the lesser known artists of course, but such is the nature of fame and art. It's a winner-takes-all world.
- icebraining 15y ago
  >Most people who give a camera to a monkey do so with the intent that a picture is taken. Not what happened here: "David Slater has already admitted that the monkeys found a camera he had left out by accident and that he did not have anything to do with setting up the shot." >The fact that a photographer was smart enough to choose "the one" hit should be rewarded. Then, are the other pictures not copyrighted?

nicker 15y ago

At TechDirt <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110713/11244515079/can-we-subpoena-monkey-why-monkey-self-portraits-are-likely-public-domain.shtml&#62 http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110713/11244515079/can-we...; they argue that by default the photos are in the public domain. We don't want to fall into the trap of assuming everything must have some copyright owner.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

onan_barbarian 15y ago

I await the resolution of this problem eagerly, so we can establish a precedent for the copyright on _code_ written by monkeys.

techiferous 15y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8S7QxpjeY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8S7QxpjeY

yters 15y ago

The owners who set up the experiment. Or if it's just fooling around with stuff, then nobody. The monkey isn't capable of rational decision making so it can't be responsible.

drallison 15y ago

Suppose there were an AI program that could write short stories indistinguishable from those produced by a human. Further assume that the AI operates independently of any human control and generates stories using rules it has discovered by "reading" human stories using machine learning. The creative process used by the machine is not unlike that used by a human. Does the law preclude stories created in that fashion from being copyright? And if they can be copyright, who is the author?

wisty 15y ago
If a human purposely set the chain in motion, it's presumably the human's. If you made an AI with no intention to create literature, then its work would be uncopyrightable (public domain?). That's why your binaries are copyright, but the monkey's accidental photographs are not. If you write a chat bot, which interacts with (and learns with) other humans, it might be more interesting.

yason 15y ago

This discussion is a great point demonstrating the utter absurdity of copyright itself. As soon as people start arguing whether the monkey, the monkey owner, or the photographer has some rights to the photo that was taken, someone ought to bring in the sanity and everyone's feet back to ground. Nature itself doesn't seem to reflect on intellectual property: it does so with physical property. If the monkey had stolen the photographer's picture, it would make sense to argue that the picture belongs to him and he deserves to get it back. That's all natural and simply manifests in the photographer no longer possessing the picture as soon as the monkey had stolen it. But, for intellectual property there is no natural manifestation that is observable. There are just endless semantic arguments about what it means to own rights to something. In the end, the picture taken by the monkey just is. There's nothing more to that.

Meai 15y ago
Your argument broken down goes like this: "If you can't touch it, it isn't natural, therefore disregard it" First of all, what is "natural" or not does not matter. What nature does should not be measure to what we do. I see no reason for that, just because 'nature' has a positive connotation nowadays, doesn't make it a logical end to strive for. "Natural" is a contrived word, and to further elaborate on this completely nonsense word and draw consequences like say "it's invalid" or "it's wrong" because of a self-proclaimed lack of the attribute you call natural, is even more so not understandable. If I may provoke a comparison, you argue with the mind of the so called 'pro-life' proponents. That is a very simplistic view of the world. Just because my idea (=photo e.g) isn't immediately transferable to physical properties, doesn't mean it's any less "real" or "natural". If I tell a guy my idea, and he implements it trivially with huge profit, then the loss is very real to me. Your naive views translate very well into the last sentence: "the picture taken by the monkey just is". You don't appear to have any will to solve the issue at hand. That's like giving up to solve the problem at all.
- dhume 15y ago
  Your argument broken down goes like this: "If you can't touch it, it isn't natural, therefore disregard it" It's more of an acknowledgment that our concept of ownership is derived from the scarcity of the objects we may own. Whether the thing over which someone claims ownership is natural doesn't enter into it. You don't appear to have any will to solve the issue at hand. I don't think GP is convinced there is a genuine issue at hand.

deathwarmedover 15y ago

Do Creative Commons licenses cover non-humans?

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
No license covers non-humans in the way I think you're implying, they don't exist as legal entities in any way that would allow them to the required legal rights. (Note I'm not saying that the law doesn't recognise their existence at all - it obviously does in many ways - just that they don't have the same rights as a human in terms of making contracts, owning property and so on).

evilswan 15y ago

It's cre-ape-tive commons. :D

evilswan 15y ago
Woah - downvote, just because it's not funny! Bit harsh.
- jokermatt999 15y ago
  Attempts at humor typically get downvoted at Hacker News. HN is more interested in discussion than humor, so it's downvoted as noise.
  - evilswan 15y ago
    Point taken.

ZeroGravitas 15y ago

Nice to see it's already been added to the relevant page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque