Wikimedia rejects photographer claims to monkey selfie

If a monkey makes a selfie, then who owns the photo? The Wikimedia Foundation believes that it is clearly not the person who owns the camera, writes The Verge. In her first “transparency report,” which reveals government and corporate requests for user information and content removal, Wikimedia told several stories illustrating the type of requests it receives, and one of them is related to a photo taken by a monkey. The photo was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and when the photographer asked to delete the photo, Wikimedia refused, stating that he did not own the copyright.

The editors of Wikipedia said that in fact, no one could make a specific claim to the photo. In their opinion, she is in the public domain, because "being the work of an animal, not a person, it does not have a human author who owns the copyright." The monkey itself is unlikely to make a complaint.

Intellectual property lawyer Brad Newberg, a partner at Reed Smith, agrees: “Just because a person owns a camera, he cannot own a photo, because he did not take this picture. He did not choose the lighting, he did not choose the angle. ” However, this does not mean that anyone can claim a photo that he didn’t take: “If the photographer actually processed it in a certain way, put some effects on it, used some lighting to make original variations, and in fact, he said: “Look at my cooperation with this monkey“, he would be part of the creative process. ”
')
Among other strange requests to Wikimedia there was a claim from the language center for the copyright of the whole language and a request to remove books that have long been in the public domain. As noted by The Verge, the rest of the report on the transparency of the Wikimedia Foundation is not so much information. Perhaps due to its open nature, Wikimedia doesn’t have as much information that governments or companies would be looking for but could not get. From June 2012 to June 2014, Wikimedia received a total of 56 requests for user data. Eight of these requests, for a total of 11 accounts, were granted by Wikimedia.

There were also very few requests for deletion and modification of information. According to Wikimedia, the foundation received 304 such requests and rejected all of them. However, out of 58 requests falling under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Wikimedia has already granted 24. Most of all requests were received from the United States and most of the requests concerned English Wikipedia, with Wikimedia Commons in second place.

Wikimedia itself notes that it receives far fewer requests than other major sites that have issued similar reports. In principle, it is clear that Google and Facebook have much more personal data of users than Wikipedia. The Foundation has created a diagram showing how big the difference between them is in the number of requests: