The ‘monkey selfies’ case is a legal issue regarding the selfies taken by Naruto, a crested macaque monkey from Indonesia. The case dragged on for months and was centered on the copyright privileges under the federal Copyright Act. The monkey took the selfies via an unattended camera of a wildlife photographer, David Slater, who was at the Sulawesi reserve in Indonesia. The legal battle began when Slater published a book referred to as the Monkey Selfies and took credit for all the photographs taken by the monkey thus infringing Naruto’s copyrights as the author of the photos (Parks and Schaefer, 2018). The allegations were brought forward by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as the ‘next friend’ of the monkey as required by the law following the 2004 ruling on Cetacean Community v. Bush . Ultimately, the 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that there was no case since PETA was not directly a next friend to the monkey and had no best interests for it and that the monkey as a non-human had no jurisdiction to sue for copyrights infringement since the law does not stipulate it.
Definitively, standing to sue refers to a legal concept in law whereby the individual who takes a case to a court of law must be an active and acceptable party to seek settlement of the issue presented. In other words, the plaintiff has to show that there are personal legal interests that have been infringed by the defendant and the defendant must be the responsible party for the perpetration of the alleged legal misdeed. According to US Legal (2016), to satisfy the standing to sue doctrine, three requirements must be met. These include injury, causation, and redressability. Furthermore, the concept is not concerned with the ultimate merits of the case but with the party that brings forth the litigation and whether he or she has the legal right to sue. The doctrine is fundamental in maximizing the court’s time to deal with relevant cases by discarding those that have no basis or jurisdiction to be heard. As such, according to the 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals, Naruto had no standing right to sue under the federal Copyright Act since there is no provision for non-human plaintiffs.
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A ‘next friend’ or ‘best friend’ or ‘guardian’ in the monkey selfies case had to be an individual that had the best interests and direct influence on Naruto’s well-being. This was not the case for PETA; according to the court, PETA’s Appeals and arguments were inadmissible because the organization had not demonstrated any significant relationship with Naruto. In addition, the court rejected the notion holding that PETA had no real conviction or dedication to the monkey’s best interest. To further affirm the ruling, the court criticized PETA for using Naruto as an unsuspecting pawn in the pursuit of its ideological intent. To this end, the court queried PETA’s motives since the earlier settlement that vacated the court’s ruling required Slater to pay PETA earnings generated by the book rather than the Monkey who was the real victim. To this end, the court ruled and found that PETA had abandoned Naruto, and as such, the monkey had no next friend standing to pursue the case. Following the denial of PETA’s standing as next friend, the court ordered PETA to pay the defendant attorney fees on appeal (Parks and Schaefer, 2018).
In the end, the court also took issue with Slater’s actions of taking the credit for the photos thus taking out all the human players in the case leaving the monkey as the stand-alone victor given the fact that the court found him as the sole author of the Monkey Selfies . However, due to the lack of next friend or guardian, and the fact that Naruto could not assert the infringement claims himself, there was no case, only the directives that favored Naruto remained.
References
Parks, K. & Schaefer, L. (2018). Copyright law of the jungle: Suing only fit for Homo sapiens. Chicago Daily Law Bulletin .
US Legal. (2016). Standing to Sue Doctrine Law and Legal Definition. Retrieved from https://definitions.uslegal.com/s/standing-to-sue-doctrine/
