Thursday 7 August 2014

creative-commons or infinite monkeys typing

Wikipedia is rebuffing the take-down requests of a nature photographer, who after leaving his camera disguised in the jungle to capture images of macaques of Indonesia discovered that the monkey had discovered the hidden device and took hundreds of selfies.
Since the images have gone viral, the photographer hoped to earn something in the form of royalties or at least recognition and became rather irked when the images became part of Wikipedia's open collection. Demands that the pictures be removed and relegated to the nature photographer were rejected by the public encyclopedia, reasoning that the monkeys were the authors of the collection and it would be their decision if the material remained in the public-domain or not. US statute, which Wikipedia cites and most editors agree with, states that non-human authors have no automatic expectation of attribution and so such material defaults to be released to public-domain. What do you think of this legal battle, this copy-fight? The photographer did go through a lot of trouble and expensive to set up this photo-booth but maybe the macaque also knew what he was creating.