Ah monkeys. They are bound to make us take ourselves less seriously with their crazy antics and primal displays of behaviour we pretend not to be intimately familiar with. All this innocence, and yet monkey selfies are causing massive copyright issues!

In 2011, British wildlife photographer David Slater traveled to Indonesia. He set up his equipment to take a photo of a crested black macaque. Suddenly, the monkey grabbed Slater’s camera and started to take selfies. As you can imagine, the selfies were hilarious and adorable, and the photos went viral as soon as they hit the Internet.[…]

This sounds like an incredible opportunity for a photographer, right? Wrong. The photo eventually ended up on Wikipedia, as well as on Wikimedia Commons, an arm of the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts photos that are in the public domain and therefore free to use. Slater asked Wikimedia to take the photo down, arguing that the copyright belongs to him, and that he should get paid whenever someone wants to use the photo.

But Wikimedia has refused to remove the photo, since it was technically taken by the monkey, not by Slater. The Huffington Post spoke to Slater, who said he was “angry” and “aggrieved” over the situation. […]

HuffPost also spoke with attorney Josh Bressler, who specializes in intellectual property law. Bressler said the “author” of a photograph is the one who has “contributed the expressive content.”

The heart of the copyright issue,  [attorney Josh Bressler, who specializes in intellectual property law] explained, is that a monkey is not considered a person under the law, and only a person can be an “author.” Legally speaking, only humans and corporations are “people.” Animals, on the other hand, are considered property, not people.

If anyone has the right to be upset it should be the monkey, right? Well David Slater doesn’t think so, as is evident by the rather aggressive copyright notice at the bottom of his site.

Because the selfies are still in the public domain (according to Wikimedia Commons), here is one of the selfies:

In the interest of acknowledging the author (clearly the monkey has some photographic skill!) credit for the capturing of this image goes to this monkey, and credit for providing the tools for this awesome situation to occur go to hard-done-by photographer David Slater.

Check out more on this crazy legal battle between man, the internet and a monkey here from the HuffPost.