Monkeying Around With Copyrights

I occasionally blog on copyrights as it is a big deal on the internet and for bloggers. A lot of people claim fair use, sometimes fairly sometimes not so much. One of the big problems can be determining who actually owns a copyright.

Photographer David Slater was in Indonesia and some monkeys got hold of his camera and started taking pictures of themselves...really. You an see one here. Copyright law says the person who took the picture owns the copyright. If I loan you my camera and you take pictures, the copyright on the picture belongs to the photographer, not the camera. Of course you can buy the copyright from a photographer (I do that for my acting headshots so I can reproduce them for example) but there is no evidence the monkeys transferred the copyright in exchange for a bunch of bananas.

Slater has been sending takedown notices for these pictures even though his claim is pretty shaky. Many websites automatically take down materials without actually checking out if they are infringing (a common tactic to surpress videos on Youtube, including politically charged videos). You can hear about this story in a segment in this week's On the Media or read about it at Tech Dirt.

Wonder if this will get a take down notice?