> There are artists who "paint" with bacteria and other live organisms. The bacteria may be producing nearly 100% of the final image (the only reason the works are noteworthy), and in many cases, the result may not be entirely anticipated by the artist. That doesn't mean the bacteria owns the copyright.
But the artist has deliberately set the experiment and put the culture in place to produce things.
In order to make it a valid analogy, the photographer should have acted in a way that purposely invited the monkey to take the camera.
This is did not happen; it was entirely an accident, and his creative input is a question of luck, whereby anyone else who carried a camera and had it stolen by a monkey who clicked around and got a selfie has the same level of input.
Really, this is all just because the guy is a professional who expects to get paid for this, but his experience in the matter has had zero influence on the result.
If I went to Southeast Asia, got my camera stolen by a monkey and had published, I did nothing special to merit attribution.
Honestly, if he had wanted to take the credit for the framing and the positioning then at least he could have done something slighly more elaborate on the matter. A selected curation of those pictures, structured as a narrative, well framed, and placed as an exhibition with accompanying material would have sufficient artistic merit. Instead he chooses to bitch about it on the Internet.
What if you go on an expedition specifically to get monkeys to take photos for you? What if you trained them? Is there some threshold amount of work you could put in before you could claim copyright, or would it always belong to the monkey?
If the monkeys were trained well enough to understand the intent of taking a photo, but not well enough to understand a contract of employment, then creatively I think they would have to own the work.
The fact that the monkey is not trained in pointing a camera is one of the things that might swing it legally away from consideration of ownership by the monkey.
Animals have been prosecuted as people a number of times in many different countries under the law. I don't see any absolute reason that they could not be granted ownership of something. Even if there was a specific law stating that this was not true, one of the moves available in the game of law is to change the law. Law is a subset of Calvinball.
If you're training a monkey who has no concept of art but you'll be orchestrating their actions for aesthetics according to your criteria then it seems evident that it qualifies for your authorship given your clear intent at achieving that specific action.
Like most things, it gets looked at on a case by case basis.
But the artist has deliberately set the experiment and put the culture in place to produce things.
In order to make it a valid analogy, the photographer should have acted in a way that purposely invited the monkey to take the camera.
This is did not happen; it was entirely an accident, and his creative input is a question of luck, whereby anyone else who carried a camera and had it stolen by a monkey who clicked around and got a selfie has the same level of input.
Really, this is all just because the guy is a professional who expects to get paid for this, but his experience in the matter has had zero influence on the result.
If I went to Southeast Asia, got my camera stolen by a monkey and had published, I did nothing special to merit attribution.
Honestly, if he had wanted to take the credit for the framing and the positioning then at least he could have done something slighly more elaborate on the matter. A selected curation of those pictures, structured as a narrative, well framed, and placed as an exhibition with accompanying material would have sufficient artistic merit. Instead he chooses to bitch about it on the Internet.