Monkey selfie copyright dispute

Between 2011 and 2018, a series of disputes took place about the copyright status of selfie photographs taken by Celebes crested macaques, using equipment belonging to British wildlife photographer David J. Slater. The disputes involved Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections that he holds the copyright. Additionally, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have argued that the copyright should be assigned to the macaque.

Slater has argued that he has a valid copyright claim because he engineered the situation that resulted in the pictures by travelling to Indonesia, befriending a group of wild macaques, and setting up his camera equipment in such a way that a selfie photograph taken by one of the animals might come about. The Wikimedia Foundation's 2014 refusal to remove the pictures from its Wikimedia Commons image library was based on the understanding that copyright is held by the creator, that a non-human creator (not being a legal person) cannot hold copyright, and that the images are thus in the public domain.

Slater stated in August 2014 that, as a result of the pictures being available on Wikipedia, he had lost at least £10,000 (equivalent to £13,819 in 2025) in income and his business as a wildlife photographer was being harmed. In December 2014, the United States Copyright Office stated that works that lack human authorship, such as "a photograph taken by a monkey", cannot have their copyright registered at the US Copyright Office. Several legal experts in the US and UK have argued that Slater's role in the photographic process would have been sufficient to establish a valid copyright claim, though this decision would have to be made by a court.

In a separate dispute, PETA tried to use the monkey selfies to establish a legal precedent that animals should be declared copyright holders. Slater had published a book containing the photographs through the self-publishing company Blurb, Inc.