
A court in San Francisco dealt with this issue until late 2018. The animal rights advocacy group PETA filed a lawsuit against the photographer David Slater for the rights to the picture a macaque took of itself in 2011. This monkey selfie opened up a discussion, and several lawsuits, on whether an animal has a claim to copyright and its proceeds. The court ruled that the monkey does not have legal standing to file the claim, since it’s not a person. The ruling raised issues about the limits of legal entity and juridical approach to objects and works of art created by non-humans. If a monkey presses the shutter release button or an algorithm produces a picture, who has the right to the resulting image?