No one, not even animals, can copyright animal selfies

 The U.S. Copyright Office recently ruled that photos taken by animals belong in the public domain, but photographer David Slater argues there's more to his 'monkey selfie' than meets the eye.

In 2011, British photographer David Slater spent three days with crested black macaques in the forests of Indonesia.

Wanting to get a close-up of a monkey’s face, Slater set up his camera on a tripod with a cable release, walked several feet away and hoped for the best.

When a curious macaque stepped up to the camera and began to play with it, Slater got the shot he was looking for: a monkey selfie.

But according to the U.S. Copyright Office, Slater doesn’t own the copyright to that photo because he didn’t actually take it.

In the first major revision to copyright law in more than two decades, the office ruled that works created by animals belong in the public domain.

“The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants,” the office said. “Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit.”

It’s yet another setback for Slater, who’s been battling publications to recognize his copyright for years now.

The debate began when the Wikimedia Commons database — a collection of photographs, videos and other media available for the public to use — added Slater's photo to its virtual catalog.

Slater officially asked Wikimedia remove the image from its database in early 2012. The monkey selfie disappeared but was later added again by another user, and this time it remained.

In its first transparency report, the Wikimedia Foundation revealed this week that it denied Slater’s request to remove the photo.

“Monkeys don’t own copyrights,” the foundation’s Chief Communications Officer Katherine Maher told The Washington Post. “What we found is that U.S. copyright law says that works that originate from a non-human source can’t claim copyright.”

Slater is pursuing legal action, arguing that the original selfie the monkey snapped is different from the version that went viral on the Web.

Copyright law deals with “transformations” of original works differently, which could complicate Slater’s case.

But Maher said Slater would have had to have made “substantial changes” to the monkey photo — changes beyond cropping and color alteration — to claim such a copyright.

“This is ruining my business,” Slater told The Post. “If it was a normal photograph and I had claimed I had taken it, I would potentially be a lot richer than I am. I’m not rich, I’m actually in debt. My life could be very much different.”

Learn more about Slater's monkey selfie and the legal challenges he faces in the video below.

Our Best Weapon Against Revenge Porn: Copyright Law?

When federal agents arrested Hunter Moore last month, the Internet breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Dubbed the “Most Hated Man on the Internet,” Moore ran the notorious revenge porn website IsAnyoneUp. His site racked up millions of pageviews and thousands of dollars in advertising revenue by posting sexually explicit photographs and detailed personal information about the people he featured on the site.

According to the indictment, Moore relied on a co-defendant, Charles “Gary Jones” Evens, to hack into victims’ email accounts and obtain nude photographs to feature on IsAnyoneUp. The pair is charged with one count of conspiracy, seven counts of aggravated identity theft, and seven counts of “unauthorized access of a protected computer to obtain information.”

Moore allegedly obtained some of the photos through hacking, but bitter exes submitted many more.

The photos hosted by websites like IsAnyoneUp are often referred to as “revenge porn.” The phenomenon is surprisingly common: One in 10 former partners threaten to post sexually explicit images of their exes online, and an estimated 60 percent follow through. (It’s also worth mentioning that upwards of 80 percent of revenge porn victims are women.)

The harms caused by revenge porn websites are very real—people featured on these sites receive solicitations over social media, lose their jobs, or live in fear that their family and future employers will discover the photos. 

The Origins of Revenge Porn

Moore may have been the “King of Revenge Porn,” but he wasn’t the first contender for the throne.

In 1980, someone at Hustler Magazine had the idea to start Beaver Hunt, a contest that published reader-submitted images of naked women. Beaver Hunt photos were often accompanied by details about the woman: her hobbies, her sexual fantasies, and sometimes her name. Some of the photos were stolen. Exes submitted many more.

Throughout the '80s, women sued Hustler for publishing their photos in Beaver Hunt without their permission. Several courts determined that publishing intimate photos without verifying whether the pictured women actually gave the go-ahead gave the false impression that all of the featured women felt comfortable with their pictures appearing in a “coarse and sex-centered magazine.”

Revenge porn websites have adopted many of the features that made Beaver Hunt notable: showing off user-generated content, submitted without the pictured person’s consent or knowledge, flanked by personal information.

There is one important difference between a nude photo appearing on a website or in the pages of a print magazine. The impact of the photo, even one featured in a popular magazine like Hustler, was still constrained by the fact that it was bound in print. Pages of the magazine could be torn out or photocopied, but the likelihood of a prospective employer coming across a Beaver Hunt photo through happenstance was slim to none.

The likelihood of an employer Googling an applicant and following up on a hit from a porn website? Significantly more likely. Throw links, cross-postings, and email into the mix, and it becomes all the more certain that revenge porn will be discovered.

More HERE Via The Atlantic

What is the science behind the selfie?

The selfie has arguably become the greatest photographic trend of our time. Why are we so interested in taking and sharing selfies and how does observing an image of yourself differ from observing a picture of someone else, asks University College London neuroscientist James Kilner.

In everyday social situations we spend a lot of our time looking at and interpreting other people's faces and facial expressions. Indeed, reading and responding correctly to other people's facial expressions is essential for successful social interactions.

Through our lifetimes we become experts at recognising and interpreting other people's faces and facial expressions. In contrast, we have very little experience of looking at our own faces.

Our perception of our own facial expression comes from our sense of feeling our faces move. This lack of visual knowledge about our own faces means we have a very inaccurate representation of what our own faces look like at any given time. For example, it has been demonstrated that when people are shown an image of themselves and asked to match it they are unable to accurately produce the same facial expression without being able to see themselves.

This lack of knowledge about what we look like has a profound effect on what we think we look like. When people are asked to pick a photograph which they think looks most like them - from a series of photographs in which an actual photograph has been digitally altered to produce more attractive and less attractive versions - people are very bad at selecting the original photograph.

Given that we have a poor representation of what we look like, this is perhaps unsurprising. What is surprising is that people systematically choose images that have been digitally altered to make the person appear more attractive.

In other words, we have an image of ourselves that tends to be younger and more attractive than we actually are.

This might in part explain our obsession with selfies. For the first time we are able to take and retake pictures of ourselves until we can produce an image that come closer to matching our perception of what we think we look like.

VIA BBC