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Nasir and Matt debate about whether a monkey can own a copyright to a photo and answer, "There has been a lot of chatter with my employees. Can I ban gossip in the office?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha… And this is Matt Staub. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Oh, nice. And welcome to the business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in at ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. MATT: Our video has a little bit of a delay so you can’t see when I’m talking. I know you were trying to time that so you said it at the same time but I got you on that one. NASIR: Even if I was a little off, we’ll have Chris line it up perfectly. MATT: Yeah. Now I’m concerned about the Friday episode because I feel like you’re going to see me. Actually, I’ve got something in mind. We’ll figure this out. But enough monkey business here because we have a story to talk about – about monkeys. NASIR: Enough monkeys now. MATT: Actually, I didn’t realize, I’d heard this story in the last couple of weeks but I didn’t realize that this was so long ago – well, not so long ago. 2011 was when this actually happened and what happened was I don’t know all the details but basically they were at (I would assume) a zoo or some sort of something like that. Basically, a monkey somehow got hold of a photographer’s camera and just took a ton of pictures. One of them was a pretty funny selfie of the money that the monkey took that I guess only recently went viral – probably because selfies have become popular this year so maybe that’s what it is. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: Anyways, someone went up on Wikipedia – I don’t know on what page – and the photographer said, “Hey, you’re infringing on my copyright. I have a copyright on this photo. You need to take it down.” Wikipedia’s response was, “Well, you don’t own the image” or “You don’t have a copyright on it so we’re not going to take it down.” It raises a couple of interesting questions. I guess the first one is, “Can this monkey actually have a copyright of the photo?” and we’re going to answer that – that it’s no – but, since that’s the case, who actually owns, who has the copyright to this photo? NASIR: I feel like we talked about… wasn’t it the selfie at the Oscars we talked about? MATT: Yeah. NASIR: Who owned the copyright for that? MATT: Yeah. NASIR: I don’t remember who took it. Do you remember who took the photo at the Oscars? MATT: Bradley Cooper, right? NASIR: Oh, yeah. Yeah, Bradley Cooper. So, it was well-established that, even though it was Ellen’s camera – a Samsung Galaxy S – was it S4 at the time? MATT: I don’t know. NASIR: This little plug-in, I’m sponsored by them, by the way, just so you know. We established that Bradley Cooper, as the photographer himself, was the one that owned the copyright to the image even though it was Ellen’s camera, even though it was maybe she’s the one that published it. So, this makes it interesting. Can a monkey own a copyright? Obviously not. But CNN actually goes through a nice little legal analysis to whether or not it’s possible that at least the camera owner owns the copyright and I started thinking about this because, okay, forget about it that it was an animal that actually took the photo, if I set a camera out to take a landscape photo and have it take a picture every five seconds or ten seconds or whatever – like, a time lapse or whatever – then I would obviously own the copyright. Even though a lot of people are saying, “Okay, well, this needs to go to court in order to actually determine because it’s kind of a sketchy area,” I can see an argument being made in proponents of the camera owner that it’s something similar. Like, if I left a camera in a certain position where let’s say that it only goes off if the animal goes by or there’s a motion detector, right?