No copy of this image is currently available to show.
This Moment began as a photograph, not as a video. Originally published on publisher-site.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
A grinning macaque took a photograph of itself, and seven years of copyright litigation followed.
What this was
A photo classified under wildlife.
It first appeared in 2011, during the social era.
The picture is charming; the argument it started is the reason it lasted. Wikimedia Commons hosted the image on the grounds that a non-human cannot hold copyright, so it belongs to nobody and is therefore public domain. Slater argued he had engineered the shot. PETA then sued on behalf of the macaque. The result is one of the few internet phenomena to produce genuine case law.
A US judge ruled in 2016 that a monkey cannot own a copyright. Slater said the dispute had cost him his livelihood as a wildlife photographer. The episode is now standard teaching material on authorship, and a permanent reminder that the question of who owns an image on the internet can be genuinely unanswerable.
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
What we knowWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a photograph, not as a video. Originally published on publisher-site.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A photo classified under wildlife.