Who owns the rights to a photo made by a monkey?

The photo you see on the screen was made by a macaque in Indonesia . She found the camera, sent it to herself and started messing around (she liked the sound that the device made when the shutter button was pressed). The question is: who owns the copyright for this self-portrait? Indeed, under the laws of many countries, including Russian, a monkey cannot be recognized as the author of a work of art.



The problem is not at all illusory. Owners of several blogs and media received a request from the Caters News Agency news agency to remove photos from the Internet , because this agency allegedly has exclusive rights to distribute them . The case may go as far as a lawsuit.









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Makaka took a few hundred shots before she was tired of the toy, but most of the photos are out of focus.



The Civil Code of the Russian Federation ( article 1228 ) establishes the following definition:

1. The citizen, by whose creative labor such result is created, is recognized as the author of the result of intellectual activity.



Citizens who have not made a personal creative contribution to the creation of such a result are not recognized as authors of the result of intellectual activity, including only technical, consulting, organizational or material assistance or assistance to the author, or only facilitating the registration of rights to such result or promoting supervising the implementation of relevant work.

As you can see, even a photographer who owns a camera (that is, who provided technical and material assistance) cannot be recognized as the author of the work.



US copyright law is similar to Russian. If the photographer installed the camera, brought the focus and only allowed the monkey to press the button, then the photographer would have the opportunity to claim authorship. But here is another case: the owner of the camera himself admitted that he had lost the camera in the forest (or left unattended) before the monkey found it.



Who, then, the copyright holder, to whom the right to distribute passed from the author? You can consider it the owner of the camera. But this interpretation does not correspond to the Civil Code quoted above. Here the situation is similar to that when the owner of the camera gives someone a picture. In this case, the owner of the camera in no case can not be considered the copyright holder and does not have any rights to this picture. He has a file in his possession, but not the right to publish it (distribution right).



There is a better option. Techdirt bloggers offer, by default, all monkey photos to be considered public domain .



Aurelia Schultz, a lawyer from Creative Commons, analyzed the legislation of different countries on this issue and came to the same conclusion: these photos are almost certainly in the public domain.