The soul of a selfie

BY SHYAM G. MENON| IN Digital Media | 21/08/2014
A monkey clicks a photo. It goes viral. Does the monkey who grabbed the camera own the copyright or the photographer?
SHYAM G. MENON ruminates on contemporary creativity and its ills. Pix: Monkey and Slater, facebook.com

A prominent eyebrow, almost like everyone’s two, fused into a face spanning-one, shaded two big brown eyes.

As primary sensor, the eyes convey a lot.

These two did.

An arm, the left one, extended towards the camera indicating a finger on the ` ‘click’ button. Another photo from the same lot was more endearing. Here, the face resembled two amusing arcs separated by a long nose. The arc at the bottom was a grin, punctuated by two prominent teeth. The arc at the top was the massive brow. From either side of the nose, a warm brown eye gazed at the viewer like bridge between worlds.

In 2011 British photographer David Slater had his camera hijacked by a Celebes Crested Macaque while taking the animals’ pictures in Indonesia. The monkey snapped many photos. A lot were wasted frames. But some were usable, including the above described selfie.

The pictures became very popular. Slater tried to stop Wikimedia from distributing one of the photos for free. Wikimedia argued that since the monkey took the photo, copyright belonged in the public domain. Slater may seek legal recourse. This was the story, reported recently. The reports I went through didn’t say how Slater got his camera back. The issue became newsworthy against the backdrop of the copyright tangle.

Is Wikimedia indisputably correct? You could argue that the camera belongs to the photographer. He brought the required gear and set it up. While the word `hijack’ was used in news reports, Wikipedia’s page on the monkey selfie quotes Slater as saying that he engineered the shot and it was his artistry and idea to let them play with the camera within eyesight.

He says he knew there was a chance of a photo being taken. Hence the photo is Slater’s property. You could try to counter this by saying an image is not all about its technological retention in camera. It is also about moment, composition, lighting and such. If so, pending another argument over what exactly worked in the given photo, whoever clicked deserves the credit.

According to an article by Stuart N. Brotman on the website of Brookings Institution, under US copyright law, authorship owes its origin to a human. Materials produced by nature, plants and animals don’t qualify.

At the same time, various courts haven’t been sympathetic to the contribution of others – like bringing the camera or installing the gear - to someone’s eventual authorship. Slater’s quandary is understandable. He made the effort to photograph the endangered monkeys and the outcome was an iconic photo he couldn’t fully monetise.

Doubtlessly, Slater is a significant portion of the effort behind the selfie. We work to earn. But my question is - shouldn’t there be room for exemption from earning - call it a sporting exemption - particularly when the click is unexpected, not by a human and yet the result went viral? It isn’t about a suddenly intelligent monkey. It is about treating copyright as a conscious option and not seeing it as a sole reason for creativity.

It took a monkey and a debate about its selfie to highlight a few things about contemporary creativity. First, a photograph is a lot easier to take now than before. Thanks to the proliferation of devices and social media’s rise, photography slipped out of the photographer/photojournalist domain to being nearly everywhere.

As with writing and journalism, it killed the security of a profession and buried the craft under tons of images, all kinds of images. Now let’s face it - a monkey can take pictures. Maybe not as intelligently as humans but the camera is sufficiently automatic for a selfie by monkey.

Second, a critical game changer in the digital age has been the shift in what used to be called a profession’s point of importance, from production to distribution. Mastery of distribution, marketing, and sales, matter as product longevity shrinks in an ever consumerist society.

Good businesses fade if they don’t have this ability. Attaching excess importance to these skills has enhanced the ability to monetise work even if the product is average.

Questioning quality is difficult for the new yardstick of quality is market acceptance. Nobody ponders whether the market’s state is any better than Slater’s camera hijacked and dancing to whoever clicks. The market rules. For whatever reason, the market loved the monkey’s selfie. As the photo becomes a phenomenon, the related angles of prospective revenue and revenue lost become irksome. Third, the monkey’s selfie turned out more evocative than many contemporary human ones. Long ago, Henri Cartier-Bresson said that the moment is everything for a photograph. Even as it wasted several frames, in the selfie that went viral, our monkey captured the moment. Blame it on technology but it got the moment spot on.

Fourth, the monkey that took the photo isn’t entitled to copyright because it isn’t human. Articles on the Internet point out, as an extension of insisting that authorship have origin in humans, that robots are closer to us and copyright than monkeys. The reason is that robots don’t work without human command at source. On the other hand, the monkey owns what intelligence it has. Strangely, this full ownership of intelligence doesn’t seem to count for copyright, which runs on an absolute insistence of human origin for authorship.

It is no doubt an irrational and emotional angle to explore, but trivialising ownership leaves you wondering what our appreciation for life and intelligence has become.

Fifth, humans want ownership of the photograph notwithstanding a monkey took it. Let’s ask a question: can the monkey repeat its perfect camera shot? Going by the reported number of frames wasted, though with some emerging usable, the chances of another successful selfie by the same monkey would seem to be a study in probability and not the deliberate use of intelligence to produce an assured result, as in the case of industry age-humans. Should we snatch credit for the animal’s selfie? Or should we be sporting?

There is another interesting angle – Slater’s exact problem would seem still photography and the monkey’s finger on the click button. I would think that if Slater can be denied copyright, so can camera traps used in the wild.

Instead of a monkey’s finger on the click button, here, you could argue that an animal’s movement or presence is what activated the eventual click and so copyright is in public domain. Further, while no click is involved, in the past, we have also had deep sea footage shot through attaching cameras to whales and sharks because it is the only way to observe animal behaviour at those depths. Legally it is human copyright. But is it so in spirit? And how much should photographers and videographers lose to accommodate this spirit?

Somehow, all this suggests that the copyright row is a product of human laws, our perception of the world and emergent insecurity to livelihood by media. Particularly the last; it bites more than the rest, forcing us to be tight fisted when surrendering or negotiating our rights. Cartier-Bresson’s moment, in our times of crowded planet, has become a moment to make money.

We need a healthy median authored by human maturity.

There’s more to the monkey’s selfie than meets the eye.

(Shyam G. Menon is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)

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