Joint or co-authorship can often prove difficult when the rights are sold or licensed for monetary profit without each of the authors’ consent. A rather eccentric example is the case of PETA v. David Slater, a British wildlife photographer. In 2011 Slater travelled to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi following a troop of macaques, a type of monkey. He set up a tripod at a location where the macaques were known to frequent and waited. A macaque grabbed Slater’s camera, smiled into the lens and clicked the shutter. The photo resembled a ‘selfie’, and due to the modern phenomenon that is ‘the selfie’, the image went viral. Its original intention was only to be published in Slater’s book entitled Wildlife Personalities but became a copyright sensational…show more content… Nonetheless the animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed legal proceedings on the macaque’s behalf; calling it Naruto. PETA claimed Naruto is a co-author of the portrait and should therefore reap financial benefits as a result of its profit. Slater contends that he in fact, was the brains behind the set of photographs of the monkey he calls Ella. “A monkey only pressed a button of a camera set up on a tripod,” he argues and said that "it was artistry and idea to leave them to play with the camera and it was all in my eyesight” (Masnick, 2011). While Slater altercates that it was his idea and equipment, PETA rebutted that Naruto expended labour, skill and judgment; the three factors that are called upon when determining true authorship in a court of…show more content… Nevertheless, Jeffrey Kerr, a lawyer with PETA said the copyright office policy “grants copyright to authors of original works, with no limit on species… Copyright law is clear: It's not the person who owns the camera, it's the being who took the photograph.” (Laidre, 2015). The case summary and file 15-cv-4324 were published in 2015 as a novel example of animal case law by the Michigan State University as part of their Animal Legal and Historical Center. The basis of this case comes across as a bit of a stunt yet it raises important issues in ascertaining authorship and the legal responsibility of one author to another. It turns to the principle of a ‘legal personality’, providing one with the capability of having legal rights and obligations (Larsen, 2012). They are therefore enabled to sue or be sued in legal proceedings. This legal concept is usually applied to corporations, which are in turn treated by law as if they are people. Christopher Stone points out in “Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”, that if inanimate right-holders such as businesses and corporations are allowed to take legal action as if they were a single person, he proposes that the same legal rights should be granted to “forests, oceans, rivers and other so called natural objects in the environment,
