David Slater / Wikimedia Commons.

In the nineteen-twenties, F. W. Champion, a British photographer, adventurer, and officer in the Imperial Forestry Service, developed a novel way to photograph India’s wildlife population. With the help of a tame elephant named Balmati, Champion roved the forests of India. When he found a well-travelled tiger route, he would set up a camera rigged up with trip wires, and leave it there overnight. (As Champion wrote in his book “With a Camera in Tiger-Land,” “pictures of tigers by daylight are not truly representative of such nocturnal beasts.”) When an unsuspecting beast would duff the line, the camera’s shutter and a flash bulb would go off, creating what might today be called an animal selfie.

Fortunately for Champion, the tigers of India did not have good legal representation. If they had, Champion might have found himself in a predicament similar to the one now faced by David J. Slater, a fellow British wildlife photographer and the main player in the ongoing monkey-selfie controversy. In 2011, Slater was visiting a park in Indonesia when a crested black macaque got a hold of one of his cameras. “They were quite mischievous, jumping all over my equipment,” Slater told the Telegraph, “and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button.” The result was hundreds of macaque selfies. The best of the images—a female macaque grinning toothily into the lens—went viral shortly thereafter, inspiring hundreds of memes and online jokes before the monkey, sadly, went the way of the Dramatic Squirrel.

This week, the grinning monkey selfie returned to the news when Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, refused Slater’s request to take the photos down from Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of free images. According to Wikimedia’s Web site, anyone who downloads the monkey selfie, or any of the millions of images on the site, can “copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.”

If Slater, as the photographer, had said that he wanted the photos taken down, Wikimedia most likely would have complied. The question that arose was whether Slater, who had not held the camera, set up the shot, or pressed the shutter, could be considered the photographer at all. Wikimedia’s position on this was clear: in the licensing conditions found at the bottom of the grinning monkey selfie, they write, “This file is in the public domain because as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.” (It should be noted that Wikimedia is not saying that the monkey owns the copyright, as others have reported, but simply that Slater does not.)

In the most basic and, perhaps, most outdated reading of United States copyright law, whoever pushes the button on the camera owns the copyright to the image produced, which means that if tourists ask you take a photo of them at the Hoover Dam, and you happen to hit the shutter button at the exact moment that Kanye West goes flying by strapped to a jet pack, you, as the photographer, would get to sell that image to TMZ. The tourists do not get credit for asking you to take the photo, or for owning the camera on which it was taken. It’s possible that, under a broad reading of intellectual-property precedent, a judge might find that the tourists, working as creative directors, were entitled to claim co-author status and split some of the revenue. All this has been complicated by the advent of surveillance cameras, smart phones, and, perhaps most relevantly, large-scale photography projects for which assistants often press the shutter button on work that will be attributed to their boss.

Slater seems to be thinking along those lines. He claims that buying the cameras, spending thousands of pounds to transport himself to Indonesia, and performing the act of neglect that allowed the monkeys to steal his cameras entitles him to full authorship of the image, regardless of who pushed the button. “In law, if I have an assistant then I still own the copyright,” he told the “Today” show. “I believe there’s a case to be had that the monkey was my assistant.”

But if one is to believe his own telling of the monkey stealing his camera, Slater not only didn’t ask the monkeys to take the selfies but eventually took the camera away. Without intent (unlike F. W. Champion, Slater did not specifically set up an environment to take a photo), clear direction (monkeys do not listen to anyone), or an employer-employee agreement (no monkeys signed anything), Slater’s claims that the monkeys were acting on his behalf are absurd. If any reasonable person left her laptop in a café, and a poet picked it up, opened up a word-processing program, and typed out this generation’s Dream Songs, could she reasonably ask for much more than her laptop back? And, since the poems were so good, maybe a selfie with this new Berryman?

In the introduction to “With a Camera in Tiger-Land,” Champion thanks his elephant, who carried him and his cameras through the forest and kept him company while he set up his shots. “What merit there may be in the pictures illustrating this book is largely due to two factors,” he writes. “The help of that splendid cow elephant, Balmati, who is frequently mentioned in the text, and to the excellent flashlight apparatus invented by Mr. Nesbit, of New York.” In the case of Mr. Slater and the macaques, the roles of the human and the beast have been reversed. While Slater does not deserve a copyright, he certainly deserves a note of thanks from the monkey photographers.