Wikimedia still refuses to remove selfies a macaque took when the ape snatched a camera away from a British nature photographer -- the crested black macaque hasn't, thus far, requested that the images be removed from Wikipedia, but the photographer would like to stake ownership and collect royalties.
Wikimedia is the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia.
Photographer David Slater was on an expedition in Indonesia to take pictures of the endangered macaques, when one of the apes swiped Slater's camera and began taking hundreds of photographs. After reviewing the images, Slater found several images the smiling non-human ape had taken of itself.
"When I saw the picture I was just stunned," stated Slater. " It was made even better when the story was picked up and it made thousands of people around the world happy. I had letters of congratulations from people as far as Iraq saying I'd made their day."
Slater said roughly one of every 100,000 photographs he takes earns him enough money to keep him working. Slater has paid roughly $17,000 in legal fees to fight for the images the macaque took with the photographer's camera, and the trip itself was costly, he said.
"That trip cost me about £2,000 ($3,370 USD ) for that monkey shot -- not to mention the £5,000 ($8,425 USD) of equipment I carried, the insurance, the computer stuff I used to process the images," Slater said. "Photography is an expensive profession that's being encroached upon. They're taking our livelihoods away.
Wikimedia, however, has contended that it was the macaque who actually snapped the prized photos and the organization has listed the selfies as public domain images on Wikipedia. US law states that non-human animals aren't inherently entitled to copyright protection for photographs they take, Wikimedia asserted.
"To claim copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial contributions to the final image, and even then, they'd only have copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image," stated Wikimedia. "This means that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls into the public domain."
Unlike tortoises, known to be slow on their feet, the macaque didn't need strawberries to entice it to try out human gadgets. Slater said the macaques seemed to have taken up poses as one of the apes grabbed the camera and started snapping photographs.
"They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button," Slater said shortly after the incident in 2011. "The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At first it scared the rest of them away, but they soon came back -- it was amazing to watch."
