A monkey's selfie could not hold its own copyright

The writer's problem

A wildlife photographer's camera was picked up by a crested macaque named Naruto, who pressed the shutter and produced a widely circulated self-portrait. An animal-rights organization sued on the monkey's behalf, arguing Naruto owned the copyright in his own image and that the photographer's use of it therefore infringed. Before any court could weigh originality or fair use, it first had to answer a threshold question the statute had never squarely faced: can a non-human animal be a copyright plaintiff at all.

What the documents show

The Ninth Circuit's opinion, filed 23 April 2018, held that Naruto had constitutional standing to sue under prior circuit precedent, but lacked statutory standing under the Copyright Act because the Act 'does not expressly authorize animals to file copyright infringement suits.' The court pointed to the Act's own vocabulary, terms like an author's 'children,' 'widow' and 'widower,' which it said 'all imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals.' The panel affirmed dismissal and awarded the defendants their appellate attorneys' fees.

The Copyright Office's own Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices lists, among its examples of works lacking human authorship, that the Office will not register 'a photograph taken by a monkey,' stated as settled registration practice rather than as commentary on the litigation. The Office's 2023 guidance on AI-generated content draws on the same 'children... widow... widower' reasoning, without naming the case, to explain why the Copyright Act's own vocabulary excludes non-human authors generally. Together the three documents show one doctrine stated three ways: by a court resolving one dispute, by an agency's registration examples, and by an agency applying the same logic to a newer technology.

The editorial choice

A publisher offered a manuscript, cover image or illustration credited to an AI system as its author, rather than as a tool a human used, faces the same threshold problem Naruto raised: the claimed author cannot hold the copyright it purports to hold. This is an editorial and contractual distinction worth keeping visible in a credit line, naming the human operator as the author and the tool as an instrument, rather than treating the question as settled by the tool's sophistication.

What stays with the author

Only a human can be listed, credited and paid as the copyright author. The Naruto opinion and the Office's guidance both stop at that threshold and do not address how much human direction of an AI system is enough to support a claim, which remains a case-by-case editorial and legal judgment.

• Who is named as the author on the registration or the credit line, a person or a tool?
• If a dispute arose, could a human explain what they specifically directed?
• Does the contract distinguish an authoring tool from an authoring party?

A monkey's selfie settled a narrow question about standing, not about creativity, but the vocabulary the court leaned on, an author's very human relations, keeps surfacing wherever a machine is proposed as more than an instrument.