Tucked into Wikipedia’s transparency report yesterda y was a tiny anecdote that involved the copyright of a photo. The story involved a selfie, a wildlife photographer, and a smiling monkey, so, quite naturally, it went on to light the content-starved summer Internet on fire.

Here’s the short version: It involves wildlife photographer David Slater, who was trekking through the Indonesian wilderness in 2011, when a group of monkeys came upon him and his equipment. “At first there was a lot of grimacing with their teeth showing because it was probably the first time they had ever seen a reflection,” Slater said at the time. “They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button.”

A crested black macaque snuck off with one of his cameras and took, according to the Telegraph, “hundreds of selfies,” most of which were blurry and unusable. Save for this: the pristine, in-focus beauty of a photograph of the female macaque’s grinning face pictured above, which gave Slater a brief brush with fame and plastered the monkey’s selfie on websites everywhere.





Inevitably, though, the monkey selfie was uploaded to Wikipedia in the public domain, and this is where things got less fun for Slater. He requested that Wikipedia take the photo down, claiming copyright; Wikipedia refused, arguing that the monkey took the shot, not Slater. It wasn’t his. Now, Slater claims that unlicensed use of the photo has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in potential royalties, and he wants Wikipedia to pay up.

It all begs a very important question (one that could very well show up in law school final exams for years to come): Who actually owns the copyright to the photograph the monkey took of herself with Slater’s camera?

Fast Company posed this question to several intellectual property experts.

“I’m on Wikimedia’s side here,” said Cyna Alderman, general council of the New York Daily News, in an email. “If you own a camera and someone else takes a picture with it, the photographer owns the photo, not the camera owner.”