Posted by Howard Cihak on August 9, 2014 at 12:55 PM
I find it disturbing that 3rd parties might have standing (legal term) to challenge someone's possibly legitimate claim to ownership of a photograph, or any other creative work. If that were the case, then logically no creative work in the world would be safe from hijacking if enough hijackers pirated the same work. It would be financially ruinous, if not outright impossible, for the claimed creator to take legal action against all those hijackers.
It seems to me only the party claiming to be the true creator should be allowed to challenge the legitimacy of someone else's copyright claim.
I think this is a really rare situation; the question here is who took and/or created this image? The artist did not, but he created the situation that allowed someone/something else to do so. I guess you can envision someone setting up a tripod on a street corner and allowing anyone who wants to shoot an image of whatever; who owns the copyright to that image. Interesting questions that hopefully won't affect any of us! Of course, maybe the real news is with today's cameras it's now true, even a monkey can take a great photograph!
Discussion
4 replieshttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11015672/Wikipedia-refuses-to-delete-photo-as-monkey-owns-it.html
It seems to me only the party claiming to be the true creator should be allowed to challenge the legitimacy of someone else's copyright claim.