The (Copyright) Law Of The Jungle

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...