"... the monkey had taken the photo, and was therefore the real copyright owner."
The fact that non-human primates can now supposedly hold copyrights is my big take-away from this.
"The term "authorship" implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable."
So the question remains: is there a copyright at all?
Was the photo really produced "solely" by the animal? No. You couldn't exactly say that a monkey with a camera lives in a natural environment.
The real talent here was preparing the camera for primate use, giving the camera to the monkey, somehow getting it back, and developing the photo. The work absolutely owes its origin to a human being. This is an unambiguous case: the man owns the copyright.
Huh. I'm thinking, the law actually could be pretty specific about who pushed the shutter button. IT wasn't the man.
Laws aren't generally written in some context-agnostic way, like a philosophy class works out after a bull session. Its lawyers writing about what's at issue at the time.
What totally floors me about this one is that I can barely but not really see an argument for public domain; i.e. no one took the photo. But would this be any different from using automatic triggers and the like? No, not really, if the monkey isn't a person.
But, assuming for purposes of argument, that something neither a person nor a legal entity can somehow copyright a photo, I'm willing to bet that said monkey didn't release that photo under an appropriate license for Wikimedia to use. So if the monkey does own the copyright, Wikimedia still doesn't have the right to use it.
It differs from an automatic trigger in that the photographer is still the one exercising the decision to take a photograph. In the case under consideration, the monkeys stole the camera while the photographer was distracted.
(Perhaps it's also worth noting that the monkeys weren't "taking selfies" per se; they were simply fiddling with the camera and noticed that pressing a button made a sound.)
It's really a fascinating corner case. On the one hand, I agree that the photo almost has to be considered to be in the public domain. On the other hand, the photographer did exercise effort and choice in retrieving his camera, finding the one (hilariously adorable) image in the several that the monkeys inadvertently took, and making it available as a photograph. (Not to mention cropping and rotating the raw photo to properly frame the monkey. But one could ignore that by focusing on the original image, which isn't shown in the article but is floating around the web.)
I suspect that if this exact situation had happened forty years, back when photos still had to be chemically developed, nobody would think for a second that the photographer didn't have full copyright ownership. He may not have exercised intent, but without his efforts there would be no photograph. It's only now, when the process of turning a camera's image into a viewable artifact has become relatively transparent, that it becomes less clear what the human photographer has contributed.
It is an interesting corner case. We'll increasingly have the ability to setup cameras that can be algorithmically controlled, perhaps using machine learning approaches to take photos based on autonomous evaluation carried by robotic vehicles. I think most would argue that the deployer of the camera is still the photographer.
However, how is that really different if--in this case--the photographer had deliberately given a bunch of monkeys cameras that they could fool around with and take pictures of each other or whatnot? In both cases, you're essentially creating the opportunity for autonomous entities to take photos under only somewhat understood conditions. And how different is that really from this case?
Levels of abstraction and indirection in the creative process. Do you draw a line somewhere?
(Mind you, in this case, IMO there's a pretty clear presumption that the human photographer owns the copyright and Wikimedia is playing with fiddly legalisms that aren't appropriate in this context.)
Automatic triggers are still set by human beings, and the framing is still done by a human. Neither is the case in this situation. The monkey can't release the copyright if it does not have copyright (which it doesn't in the US since it's not a human, see prev. comment), so it is in the public domain.
I've been thinking about an analogous real-life situation: I'm on vacation and ask a random stranger, "Please take a picture of me in front of this landmark." Who owns the copyright in this case? Does it depend on who has creative control over the photo? (i.e. if I set up the photo and they just push the button vs they compose the photo and tell me where to stand.) I've thought this over, and I see reasonable arguments on both sides.
I'm guessing, in theory, they do. In practice, well, it's not an issue. And if there were situations where this were commercially important, you'd want to make clear that copyright was explicitly assigned.
This is a BBC addition. There's no copyright in the photo, as the creation of a non-human animal it's not copyrightable. This is clear US copyright law, and is also true in pretty much all countries that have a copyright law (copyright is pretty uniform).
There's clearly a niche in the market for reputation management. I know it exists, but perhaps something that can be used by the 90,000 people send requests to Google would generate a bit of income?
The photograph example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Carstairs_In_Concert.j... is odd. The photographer took the picture, and has released it to the public domain. There is clearly confusion between photographers and venues / bands about what the laws actually are, and what reasonable behaviour is. I'd be interested to know why the musician wants this very low quality photo taken down?
You don't have an automatic right to take pictures in private venues. If the ticket or signage states /photography is not allowed' then your copyright claim is invalid, and the material is not yours to give away. Rather a stingy policy for a venue to have, of course, but then nobody is forced to attend a concert or similar event if they don't like the conditions of attendance.
You certainly don't lose copyright protection of a photo you took because you were told not to do so. You just risk being thrown out of the venue or other legal trouble.
A music performance in front of an audience is audiovisual. You would be right if we were talking about a photograph of a radio taken while the performance was broadcast, but we're not. Indeed, when people mention they attended a concert, they say things like 'I went to see my favorite band last week,' as opposed to saying they went to listen to them.
wikimedia itself observes that shoting without a permit may put you in breach of a contract you signed when you purchased the ticket, as I alluded to above:
For sure, but that by itself doesn't provide a full defense (per http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html). Bear in mind that if the ticket contractually forbids photography and the event is not in a publicly accessible venue, the issue might well be decided under contract rather than copyright law.
Probably they are trying to track clicks and do not have logic in place to simulate middle-clicks.
Dear fellow web developers, please stop overriding essential browser functionality like scrolling, clicking on external links, right clicks and touch events. Especially on a web page with static content. Trust me, it will break.
Nice mob mentality, let's all pick up on the awkward guy who wants his brush with the law or crazy hairstyles removed from the internet so he can try to get job a after a long depression.
The "right to be forgotten" law is for the rich and powerful to conceal their past bad behaviour from the public record; it's certainly not for the benefit of the likes of you and me.
>>> The judges involved decided that citizens had the right to have links to "irrelevant" and outdated data erased from search engine results.
I wonder, are Google doing this to make the 'forgotten' content "relevant" again, because of recent news articles covering the move. Then they can start linking to it again?
Has anyone started some work to find out the complete list of "forgotten" links? It shouldn't be hard to create a bot to parse the Wikipedia "People" categories, then run searches for each person on Google UK. If the article doesn't show up in the results, it means it's a forgotten link.
Then all these links could be listed in a website. Maybe the simple fact that each "forgotten" link is automatically listed there will prevent people from using this right to be forgotten, and make the law obsolete.
I think Google is sending sites notice for all removed links, so the list linked from the article [1] should be complete for Wikimedia. Of course, that doesn't apply to the entire rest of the web..
>While the links do not appear on Google.co.uk and other versions of the search engine created for specific EU countries, they do still appear on Google.com, which can be accessed in Europe.
Even a great firewall of Europe would not make this kind of censorship work.
Many people in the EU, including myself, don't bother with the localised versions of Google since the results can be annoying. Having said that it really is frustrating not to be able to easily restrict a search all the EU ccTLDs.
Except for local search (shops and restaurants for me) I never use the German version of Google, it's so much worse.
Sometimes I use the German version accidentally and it feels like Google is broken somehow.
The most annoying thing is, that when you type google.com (instead of google.de for example) you still get the localized version.
I don't keep Google cookies for long, so http://www.google.com/ncr is in my muscle memory.
I wouldn't assume that the Foundation or the Wikipedia community would think that the existence of the DMCA safe harbor is a good idea or that it's OK that people invoke it against Wikipedia. Certainly the Foundation is very actively involved in pushing back against takedowns; notice that that page "does not include the numerous requests that were found to be invalid or otherwise inappropriate where no content was removed" -- presumably through the hard work of Foundation lawyers resisting those takedowns.
Note also that whereas Google gets millions of DMCA takedowns, Wikimedia gets hundreds. That's because the editors - the volunteers who do all the actual work - are zealous (sometimes ridiculously so) about copyright.
Wikimedia is the only web 2.0 site that gives a hoot about copyright.
It's not exactly pointless. After all, the original websites are still up and running, it's just more difficult to find this content with a search engine. Having an obscure list of links somewhere isn't going to make the information that much more dangerous.
