Lifestyle

Does this monkey own the copyright to his selfies?

A British photographer wants Wikipedia to stop monkeying around and give him the credit he’s due for a famous selfie taken by a primate he claimed to be his assistant.

David Slater says he hasn’t seen a dime from the now-viral photo of a crested black macaque that somehow swiped his camera and fired off a cheerful selfie in the Indonesian forest in 2011, NBC news reports.

Deemed in the public domain by the Wikimedia Foundation, the photo appeared on a Wikipedia page back in January, and controversy has surrounded it ever since.

Slater said he believed he held the copyright to the image because the monkey who snapped the selfie was recruited to be his right-hand man.

“In law, if I have an assistant, and the assistant presses the camera on my behalf, I still own the copyright,” he told the Today show.

“It’s no different to what happened here. I believe there is a case to be had that the monkey was my assistant.”

Slater now hopes to do battle in court over who technically owns the rights to the photos since Wikipedia refused to remove them from their website.

“If a monkey takes a photo, it doesn’t have copyright, so the image is in the public domain,” Wikipedia’s Katherine Maher told Today.

Lawyers who’ve caught wind of Slater’s interest in pursuing legal action said they’ve never heard of such a peculiar case before.

“It’s very rare to hear such monkey business like this, because it just doesn’t happen,” said Blank Rome LLP partner, Ken Bressler.

“Animals rarely assert their rights to copyrights.”