Continuing the saga of human rights in the, uh, person of Naruto the macaque, US District Judge Orrick has declined to grant rights to the photo, and damages custody, to the animal rights organization PETA. From Ars Technica:
A federal judge on Wednesday said that a monkey that swiped a British nature photographer’s camera during an Indonesian jungle shoot and snapped selfies cannot own the intellectual property rights to those handful of pictures. …
“I’m not the person to weigh into this,” Orrick said from the bench in San Francisco federal court. “This is an issue for Congress and the president. If they think animals should have the right of copyright they’re free, I think, under the Constitution, to do that.”
The US Copyright Office previously ruled that the owner of the camera does not own the rights to the picture, despite his assertion that his actions led to the creation of the picture – even if he did not personally take the picture. Assuming any and all appeals also fail, I suppose this leaves the picture void of the intellectual attribute of ownership, or, in other words, it’s now in the public domain.
To this software engineer, it’s a bit of a ticklish point. A remote camera? Sure, copyright to the guy who hit the remote button. (But what if it wasn’t him, even though he owned the equipment and planned to hit the button, but his neice, say, hit it to take the key picture?) How about someone who puts a camera where a critter might hit the button on the hopes that a good one’s selected? Still a copyright for them?
The joyous insanity of inflicting human intellectual structures on creatures that are not human.
And we’ll let NewScientist‘s Feedback column (23 January 2016) have the final comment:
So now we know – although a room of monkeys chained to typewriters may eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare, the furry little bards will never see a penny in royalties.
Takes all the fun out of stochastic processes, doesn’t it? OK, now I’m starting to think about an artificial intelligence choosing to hit the button as a serendipitous moment … an extension of previous discussion.
