Lawyer Monthly - November 2021 Edition

2 0 1 5 Naruto vs. Slater 2 A more recent dispute than the others in this collection, the so- called “monkey selfie” battle that reached international fame had its roots in British wildlife photographer David Slater’s visit to the Tangkoko Reserve in Indonesia in 2011. While photographing a troop of crested macaques, Slater positioned his camera on a tripod, after which one of his subjects approached the camera and took several pictures of himself. Slater sent these pictures to his agent, after which they appeared in the Daily Mail and several other publications, including Slater’s own self- published book. Disputes over the ownership of the picture began in 2014 when Wikipedia uploaded one of Slater’s monkey pictures to its database and tagged it as being in the public domain, reasoning that a picture taken by an animal could not be protected under copyright. The site resisted Slater’s attempts to have the picture taken down. Following this, the campaign group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sued Slater in a California court in 2015 on behalf of the macaque (named Naruto in the suit). PETA attempted to assert copyright over the picture, claiming that it had “resulted from a series of purposeful and voluntary actions by Naruto, unaided by Mr Slater”. US District Judge William Orrick dismissed the action in a provisional ruling in 2016 on the grounds that animals do not have standing in a court of law and therefore cannot sue for copyright infringement. PETA appealed the decision, leading to surreal scenes in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as judges and lawyers cracked monkey jokes and argued whether PETA might have identified the wrong macaque. PETA and Slater eventually settled the case out of court in 2018. Precise details of the settlement are unknown, though PETA have stated that the terms include a commitment by Slater to donate 25% of the picture’s future earnings to charities protecting the crested macaque’s Indonesian habitats. “PETA and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for nonhuman animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal,” the two parties said, according to a joint statement quoted on PETA’s website. 20 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM