In 2011, British nature photographer David Slater set up his camera in an Indonesian forest and stepped back. A crested macaque named Naruto wandered over, grabbed the gear, and took a series of self-portraits. One of them, an unnervingly poised grin into the lens, went viral. It also kicked off a years-long legal saga that eventually involved Wikimedia, the U.S. Copyright Office, PETA, and a federal appeals court.
The case ended without a clean answer to the deeper question: when a non-human pulls the trigger, who, if anyone, owns the result?
The Wikimedia fight
The first dispute was procedural. Slater claimed copyright over the images and demanded their removal from Wikimedia Commons, where editors had uploaded them as public domain. Wikimedia refused. Their reasoning was straightforward: U.S. copyright law requires human authorship, and a macaque isn’t human. If the monkey took the picture, no one owns it.
The U.S. Copyright Office sided with Wikimedia in 2014 when it explicitly updated its compendium to state that works produced by animals are not copyrightable. Slater pushed back, arguing that he had set up the equipment, chosen the location, and curated the resulting images, which he said amounted to authorship. The Copyright Office wasn’t persuaded. Setup is not the same as creation.
The PETA lawsuit
In 2015, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed suit on behalf of Naruto, arguing that the macaque should hold the copyright and that PETA should administer the rights as next friend. The case was, even by PETA standards, ambitious. It hinged on whether the Copyright Act extends to non-human animals.
A federal district court dismissed the suit. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2018, holding that animals lack statutory standing under the Copyright Act. Along the way, PETA and Slater reached a settlement in which Slater agreed to donate 25% of future revenues from the images to charities benefiting crested macaques. The court declined to vacate the lower ruling as part of the deal, which left the precedent intact.
What the case actually settled
The case settled less than people think. The clear holding: animals can’t sue for copyright infringement under U.S. law, and works produced solely by non-humans aren’t copyrightable. The harder question, what counts as sufficient human authorship when humans set up systems that generate output, was left for another day.
That day arrived faster than expected. AI-generated images now raise the same question in a new form. The Copyright Office has held that purely AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable, citing the same human-authorship requirement that decided Naruto’s case. The macaque, in other words, was a precursor to a much larger fight about machine creativity.
The bottom line
The monkey selfie case is funnier than most copyright disputes and more consequential than its premise suggests. It established that authorship requires a human, that animals lack standing, and that setting up a camera doesn’t automatically make you the author of what it captures. Those rulings are quietly shaping how courts now think about AI-generated work, which means a macaque in Indonesia helped settle a question affecting every digital artist alive.
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