
If an idea isn’t protected by copyright, it ends up in the public domain, meaning anyone can use it. Take the case of the monkey selfie. When wildlife photographer, David Slater, travelled to Indonesia to follow a group of monkeys in 2011, he was totally oblivious to the mammoth legal case that would ensue. Striving for the perfect shot, he let the monkeys play around with his camera and take pictures of themselves. The British tabloids snapped up the story and Slater’s images went viral. But then Wikipedia decided the image didn’t belong to Slater; the images hadn’t been made by a human and were thus in the public domain.