A photo taken in 2011 of a monkey grinning for the camera recently published by Wikipedia has sparked an interesting copyright debate. Although British photographer, David Slater, didn’t technically take the picture (the monkey did!) he does maintain that the picture is his property and that Wikipedia had no right to publish it. The publication of the picture by Wikipedia has apparently cost the photographer thousands of dollars in lost earnings.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, only publish photos that are in the public domain as it is "a record of human knowledge, viewpoints and summaries that already exist and are expressed elsewhere". The photographer, spent time in Indonesia, followed the monkeys and set up the shot carefully so that the monkey could press the button and capture the picture. A spokesperson for Wikipedia has commented that nobody in fact owns the copyright as it can’t belong to the monkey and it has no human author in whom copyright is vested. Continue Reading Everyone is going bananas