Should a person be denied the copyright to his own work, just because he’s not actually a person?
Animals are dumb. PETA is dumber. Katherine Timpf, NRO:
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a monkey claiming that the monkey owns the rights to selfies it took…
The selfies in question were taken way back in 2011, when a monkey named “Naruto” grabbed photographer David Slater’s camera and snapped them…
Right now, no one owns the photos. Slater has insisted that he holds the rights to the images. However, Wikimedia, which has made them available for publishing for free, maintains that no one owns them since a monkey took them and monkeys are not covered under copyright law — which is exactly what PETA has a problem with.
PETA is claiming that Naruto has “intellectual property rights.” Naruto is a macaque. PETA is trying to erase the line between human rights and animal “rights,” because PETA is made up of deeply dishonest, radical freaks. If they can convince a judge that an animal has property rights, they think that’ll bring them one step closer to shutting down McDonald’s and KFC for good.
If Naruto is a human being, then what does the “A” in PETA stand for? Never mind, I just figured it out…
All this talk about animals is making me hungry. You know what I could really go for right about now?