A court ruled a monkey cannot hold a copyright

The image

The 'Monkey Selfies' are close-up photographs of a crested macaque's grinning face, taken in 2011 in a reserve on Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Ninth Circuit's opinion states that photographer David Slater left his camera unattended, and a macaque later identified as Naruto took the photographs. Slater and Wildlife Personalities, Ltd. published the images, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued on Naruto's behalf, naming Slater, Wildlife Personalities, and Blurb, Inc. The opinion treats the photograph only as the subject of a standing dispute, not as a work whose composition it assesses.

What the documents show

The panel filed its opinion on 23 April 2018, affirming dismissal. It held Naruto had Article III standing under circuit precedent, but lacked statutory standing under the Copyright Act because the statute 'does not expressly authorize animals to file copyright infringement suits.' The opinion cites statutory terms governing who may inherit termination and renewal interests, 'children,' 'grandchildren,' 'widow,' and 'widower,' stating these 'imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals.' A concurrence argued the case should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, without reaching the merits. Nowhere does the opinion discuss machine-generated or artificial-intelligence output; its reasoning is confined to animal authorship, and it is the only source of the human-language argument later commentary connects to non-human authorship, including what the Copyright Office's Compendium separately states for works 'produced by nature, animals, or plants' or by 'a machine or mere mechanical process.'

Production context

For a reference library, the lesson is procedural: an image's authorship status can be litigated independently of how it was made. This is an editorial reading, but it follows the opinion's framing, since the court never evaluates the photograph's composition, only who may hold rights in it under statute. That distinction matters for weighing whether a similarly non-human-made frame, a trail-camera capture, an unattended drone shot, can be cleared or credited by ordinary means. The opinion answers only whether an animal may sue over one.

Reference versus imitation

The reference-versus-imitation line here is doctrinal: the difference between citing Naruto v. Slater for the narrow holding it states and citing it as though it decided a broader question. The ruling is often invoked in discussions of AI-generated images, yet 'artificial intelligence' appears nowhere in the opinion. Extending its holding to machine authorship without qualification would misstate what the court decided. Citing the case for what it says, that the Copyright Act's language presumes a human claimant, is reference; citing it as a ruling on AI borrows authority the opinion does not carry.

• Does a cited ruling actually address the authorship question at hand, or only a doctrinally adjacent one?
• What statutory language, if any, does the source quote to support a human-authorship reading?
• Do the named parties, court, and filing date in a summary match the opinion's own procedural posture?

Naruto v. Slater remains useful because it is narrow: a Ninth Circuit panel found an animal lacks statutory standing under a specific statute, on specific textual grounds, in a case about a wildlife photograph. Anything read into it about machine authorship is analogy, not holding.