Good day all. Once again it’s PETA top the rescue! A few years ago, a photographer, David Slater, was taking pictures of macaque monkeys when one of them took his camera and started taking selfies.
Those picture became some of the biggest viral photographs on the internet. There has been an ongoing battle between the owner of the Camera, David Slater, and pretty much everyone else over the copyrights to the pictures. It’s basically come down to the fact that since Mr. Slater didn’t actually take the pictures, and animals can’t hold copyrights, the photos are in the public domain.
And then comes the moonbats of PETA. PETA has decided that animals should hold copyrights, so they have gone to court to protect the copyrights of the monkey that took those selfies. Here are the details from ABC News:
A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs should be declared the copyright owner of the photos, rather than the nature photographer who positioned the camera, animal-rights activists contend in a novel lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It seeks a court order allowing PETA to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as 6-year-old Naruto, and other crested macaques living in a reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Ah HA! So PETA wants to be the ones who control all revenue from those pictures? Why am I not surprised? Of course, the camera owner is not happy with PETA’s plans.
The photos have been widely distributed elsewhere by outlets, including Wikipedia, which contend that no one owns the copyright to the images because they were taken by an animal, not a person. Slater, who is exploring legal action against some of those outlets, said he was “very saddened” by PETA’s lawsuit because he considers himself an advocate of animal rights.
Don’t you just love it when Progressives fight amongst themselves over all that filthy lucre ((Filthy Lucre: Noun phrase: MONEY))? Of course, there is a small problem, both with Mr. Slater’s claims as well as those of PETA.
Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office issued an updated compendium of its policies, including a section stipulating that it would register copyrights only for works produced by human beings. It specified that works produced by animals, whether a photo taken by a monkey or a mural painted by an elephant, would not qualify.
However, Jeffrey Kerr, a lawyer with PETA, said the copyright office policy “is only an opinion,” and the U.S. Copyright Act itself does not contain language limiting copyrights to humans. “The act grants copyright to authors of original works, with no limit on species,” Kerr said. “Copyright law is clear: It’s not the person who owns the camera, it’s the being who took the photograph.”
PETA has on occasion pursued lawsuits that were widely viewed by other legal experts as offering little chance of success — for example, a 2011 lawsuit accusing the SeaWorld parks of keeping five killer whales in conditions that violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on slavery. A federal judge dismissed the suit, saying the 13th Amendment applied only to humans.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who supports animal rights, expressed misgivings about the litigation. “It trivializes the terrible problems of needless animal slaughter and avoidable animal exploitation worldwide for lawyers to focus so much energy and ingenuity on whether monkeys own the copyright in selfies taken under these contrived circumstances,” he said.
You know who is enjoying all this? People like myself who understand that these people are idiots and shouldn’t be allowed out of the house without adult supervision. All of these clods think that animals have the same rights as humans. Well allow me to be a wet blanket here. Animals have NO rights. Humans do have responsibilities. Groups like PETA truly believe that animals are actually more important than people, to the point that they would happily sacrifice a child if it meant saving a cockroach.
I am no expert on the legal system, (Which is just the way greedy lawyers want it so we have to pay them huge amounts of money), but this shouldn’t even have reached the point of being filed in federal court. Any honest and competent judge, (Ok, I know I’m reaching here, but there’s always hope), should take one look at this, laugh hysterically and then summarily dismiss the case and order PETA to pay for the time wasted by the courts in the first place.
That won’t happen of course. This is the land of the Fruits, Nuts and judges so stupid that they don’t have the sense to close their mouths, lower their heads and come in out of the rain. (I understand that drowning cases among judges increases exponentially when it rains out. I have a sick feeling that this will go to trial. If the judge is dumb enough to do this, then he, or she should be removed for incompetence.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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