Just Monkeying Around – Animals Selfies Can’t Be Copyrighted:
Just a quick post for all those budding wildlife photographers out there – don’t let a curious monkey (or any other jungle animal for that matter) push the shutter button on your camera instead of you. Why you ask?
The U.S. Copyright Office has recently released a new public draft of its compendium of practices, which clearly states that it will only recognize original works created by a human being. This means that if you happen to set up a camera for monkeys to take selfies with (as was recently done by photographer David Slater), you won’t be able to enforce the copyright of these images.
It goes back to the basic concept that the copyright to a photograph is owned by the person who actually pushes the shutter button to take the photo. It doesn’t matter who is in the photo, or who owns the camera – the actual person hitting the shutter button is the photographer and the owner of the copyright.