Monday, July 18, 2011

Monkeying Around With Copyrights

I occasionally blog on copyrights as it is a big deal on the internet and for bloggers. A lot of people claim fair use, sometimes fairly sometimes not so much. One of the big problems can be determining who actually owns a copyright.

Photographer David Slater was in Indonesia and some monkeys got hold of his camera and started taking pictures of themselves...really. You an see one here. Copyright law says the person who took the picture owns the copyright. If I loan you my camera and you take pictures, the copyright on the picture belongs to the photographer, not the camera. Of course you can buy the copyright from a photographer (I do that for my acting headshots so I can reproduce them for example) but there is no evidence the monkeys transferred the copyright in exchange for a bunch of bananas.

Slater has been sending takedown notices for these pictures even though his claim is pretty shaky. Many websites automatically take down materials without actually checking out if they are infringing (a common tactic to surpress videos on Youtube, including politically charged videos). You can hear about this story in a segment in this week's On the Media or read about it at Tech Dirt.

Wonder if this will get a take down notice?

6 comments:

SER said...

Very interesting...so the monkey's own the copyrights!

This is interesting that the photographer owns it even though it could be someone elses camera, I never knew that.

Thanks for the post...!!!

OKIE said...

I saw this on the NBC Nightly News. Just amazing, especially when they looked like they were smiling.

Huck Finn said...

I guess if corporations can be people, monkeys can be also.

hale-bopp said...

I wish, huck! Copyrights must be held by people. It looks like these pics would fall into the public domain under current law (which is not a bad place for them).

And they are great pics. Google "monkey self portrait" and you will find plenty of them.

Yeah, Ser. Makes you think twice about asking someone else to take a photo of you on vacation!

OrbsCorbs said...

This is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. More confusing, too. Any minute, some lawyer is going to pop up claiming that he/she represents the monkeys.

kkdither said...

I saw this on the news too. Very cool. I have also seen dogs bark at themselves in the mirror and cats scare themselves...