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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday July 18 2017, @10:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the monkey'ing-around dept.

About six years ago photographrapher David Slater was taking pictures of monkeys and got a monkey to take a selfie with his equipment. The case has been in and out of court over copyright issues because while it was Slater's equipment and he set up the situation some claim that it is the monkey who holds copyright over the image while others claim that no one at all has copyright over the image. A serious attempt is being made to use the case to push for copyright and other ownership rights for non-humans. The image is now being use to try to force the issue of non-human rights, using methods that might do a lot of damage along the way.

Ars Technica is about the only site to notice so far. They write that the case is no laughing matter. PETA's quest for animals to own property could end the web as we know it. Specifically this image has become relevant to the future of the WWW and the Internet because the strategy chosen involves first asserting that companies that supply tools for people to self-publish their own works can be held liable for the content posted or uploaded by third parties.


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  • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday July 19 2017, @01:20AM (1 child)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 19 2017, @01:20AM (#541263) Journal

    Not exactly, corporations are a group of people, even if they sometimes behave like a bunch of monkeys.

    Going from an individual human and its inherent rights(1) to granting those same rights to a group of people does not in any way, shape or form lead to granting the same rights to non-people.

    A similar line of attack was used against slavery (see here [nytimes.com] and here [wikipedia.org] ) by granting rights to a slave, specifically the ‘habeas corpus’ right to a fugitive slave. (Habeas Corpus is the right you have, if held against your will, to be presented to a Judge or Court to determine if there are legal grounds for your detention.)

    A similar tactic was used for two monkeys in New York (see here [nytimes.com]) in a similar case, the New York Supreme Court (see here [rt.com]) denied the ‘personhood’ of monkeys.

    “While petitioner's avowed mission is certainly laudable, the according of any fundamental legal rights to animals, including entitlement to habeas relief, is an issue better suited to the legislative process” wrote Justice Weber.

    Black people are people, monkeys are not. It might be hard to swallow but interbreeding is not possible in the later case while it is in the former, so we can conclude that black people and other people of different skin color are still 'human' while no furry cousin of ours is.

    So I don’t think PETA is going anywhere, except bankrupting a couple of people trying to defend themselves against a very ill-conceived tactic to grant animals rights.

    (1) I get tired of his or hers, or his//hers, so its it is!

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:19AM (#541279)
    Clearly the next line of legal attack should be developing human-monkey hybrids. You know, for science^W Animal Rights!