Between 2011 and 2018, a series of disputes took place about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British wildlife photographer David J. Slater.

Slater has argued that he has a valid copyright claim because he engineered the situation that resulted in the pictures by travelling to Indonesia, befriending a group of wild macaques, and setting up his camera equipment in such a way that a selfie might come about.

Slater stated in August 2014 that, as a result of the pictures being available on Wikipedia, he had lost at least £10,000 (equivalent to £14,143 in 2023) in income and his business as a wildlife photographer was being harmed.

[2] Several legal experts in the US and UK have argued that Slater's role in the photographic process would have been sufficient to establish a valid copyright claim, though this decision would have to be made by a court.

The following day, Amateur Photographer reported that Slater gave them further explanation as to how the photographs were created, downplaying the way newspaper articles had described them; Slater said reports that a monkey ran off with his camera and "began taking self-portraits" were incorrect and that the portrait was shot when his camera had been mounted on a tripod, with the primates playing around with a remote cable release as he fended off other monkeys.

[15] Slater also said in a 28 July 2017 Vice magazine interview that some news outlets were misreporting how he obtained the selfie, but he went along with it because it was "a bit of fun and some good publicity for the conservation cause".

[17] On 9 July 2011, an editor on Wikimedia Commons, a site that only accepts media available under a free content license or in the public domain, uploaded the selfie photographs from The Daily Mail.

[10] The uploader claimed that the photographs were in the public domain as "the work of a non-human animal", adding that "it has no human author in whom copyright is vested".

"[21][23] Slater counterargued in response to both the Wikimedia Foundation and Techdirt that he had made significant creative contributions to the monkey selfie photographs that would make the public domain argument moot.

I set the camera up on a tripod, framed [the shot] up and got the exposure right ... and all you've got to do is give the monkey the button to press and lo and behold you got the picture.

"[1] In a story published on or before 14 August 2014 on his own website, Slater said that the monkeys stealing the camera was a separate incident that occurred before the "selfies" were taken.

[15] Slater went on to say, "I put my camera on a tripod with a very wide angle lens, settings configured such as predictive autofocus, motorwind, even a flashgun, to give me a chance of a facial close up if they were to approach again for a play ...

[29] Conference attendees, including Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation board member Jimmy Wales,[30] posed for selfies with printed copies of the macaque photograph.

[4] The macaque photographs appeared in a book titled Wildlife Personalities that Slater had published via San Francisco-based self-publishing company Blurb, Inc. On 22 September 2015, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against Slater and Blurb in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to request that the monkey, whom they named Naruto, be assigned copyright[31] and that PETA be appointed to administer proceeds from the photos for the benefit of Naruto and other crested macaques in the reserve on Sulawesi.

[7][32] Orrick dismissed the case on 28 January, ruling that "if Congress and the president intended to take the extraordinary step of authorizing animals as well as people and legal entities to sue, they could, and should, have said so plainly.

[41] As part of their joint motion to dismiss the appeal and vacate the judgment, the parties have asked for vacatur, which would nullify the record in the lower court.

The judges noted that their decision had to be considered in light of Cetacean Community v. Bush, a 2004 case heard by the Ninth Circuit that found, under some circumstances, animals could have some standing to seek legal action, and encourages that the Ninth Circuit should hold an en banc hearing to review their decision in Cetacean in light of the monkey selfie case.

[45][9][46] On 25 May, a Ninth Circuit judge made a call for the case to be heard en banc, potentially to overrule the Cetaceans Community precedent.

The court requested the parties to provide briefs within 21 days on whether the en banc hearing should be granted[47][48] and on 31 August, they declined to review the case.

[1][53] Slater was unable to travel to the July 2017 court hearing in the United States for lack of funds and said he was considering alternative careers as a dog walker or tennis coach.

[55] Some legal professionals have suggested that Naruto v. Slater could be a potential precedent in copyright litigation over works created by generative artificial intelligence.