It started as a funny news piece. A British photographer named David Slater was working on location in Indonesia in 2011. He was taking pictures of a group of macaque monkeys when one stole his camera. A group of the monkeys then started playing with the camera, and in their frenzied curiosity managed to take photographs of themselves.

Most of the resulting pictures were blurred and out of focus. But one or two came out as perfect "selfies", and the images have since gone viral.

Among many others, Wikipedia picked up on the story and uploaded the pictures to its site, it seems without reference to Mr Slater. He then asked the Wikimedia Foundation to take them down, his basis being that he is the owner of the copyright in the photographs, and did not consent to their use in this manner.

The Foundation has refused to do so. Their argument is that Mr Slater cannot own the copyright in the pictures because he did not physically take them.

Obviously the Foundation does not seek to claim that the monkey is the owner of the copyright. A monkey cannot in law own anything. Instead the Foundation claims that no-one owns the copyright (according, it seems to say, to US law), and so the pictures are in the public domain and free for all to use.

The result is that Mr Slater is deprived of royalties and has no say as to how the images are utilised.

This tension between an author's rights and the free use of data often polarises opinion. On the one hand, there are those who campaign for the end of copyright and other intellectual property laws. On the other, there are those like Mr Slater for whom such laws mean the protection of their livelihoods. As Mr Slater has publicly pointed out, he spent considerable sums on the trip, and is now effectively being deprived of the right to profit from his endeavours.

Photographs can pose difficult questions when it comes to attributing authorship. Unlike its predecessors the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the "Act") contains nothing specific as to ownership of photographs. And so the general rule, that "he who creates owns", applies equally to photographs as to other works (of art, literature, and so on). Usually this results in an obvious conclusion: the photographer authors the photograph, even if he has been commissioned by the subject of the photograph to take it.

But Mr Slater's photographs are illustrative of a common problem. For instance, imagine that one person carefully arranges a scene which is to form the backdrop of a photograph of himself. That person does all the work in order for the picture to be created, but another person simply operates the camera. In such a situation, the arranger – who, in practical terms, is the cause of the final picture and who expended skill and labour to produce it – will be the owner of the copyright in the resulting image.

This outcome of course depends upon the facts of each case, and may result in joint ownership of the copyright between arranger and photographer. However, in Mr Slater's case, it was solely his skill and effort which brought about the picture, which cannot be attributed to any other person. Common sense therefore suggests that the copyright should vest with him.

Arguably, therefore, if the matter were to be decided under English law, Mr Slater would be held to be the owner of the copyright in his pictures. However, given that Mr Slater's dispute is with an entity located in the US, resolving the matter may be less than straightforward, and the dispute may well go on for some time to come.

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