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Monkeying around with copyright law!

Writer's picture: Nick RedfearnNick Redfearn

The longstanding case of Naruto the Indonesian macaque is coming to an end.  Naruto, a wild black macaque from Sulawesi picked up wildlife photographer David Slater’s camera over a decade ago and snapped the now famous selfie.

 

Slater argued the picture was his work, and in came various others to argue non humans can create copyright.  Historically copyright and other property rights had to be owned by ‘legal persons’. This limited many assertions in history by children, foreigners, slaves, companies or legal entities and so on. Today more than ever such ownership restrictions are topical as AI creations are possibly non-human creations.

 

Naruto’s claim to ownership was brought by PETA the animal rights organization in the US but the case has now been finally dismissed. But the issue has been supercharged since OpenAI launched ChatGPT and vast amounts of non human-created content now exists. Last week the USPTO stated that human LLM prompts are not authorship for the purposes of copyright in AI content.

 

Naruto is just one of a long list of non humans claiming copyright. He will go down in legal as well as photographic history!

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