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The picture is among the thousands the site makes available for free under its Wikimedia Commons, a fact that Slater says is costing him royalties. The picture went viral in 2011 when the media reported on the selfie. "He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn't worked that out yet," Slater told The Telegraph in July 2011 as he described the monkey hijacking his gear.The image has at times been removed from the Wikimedia Commons by various site editors."If the monkey took it, it owns copyright, not me—that’s their basic argument. What they don’t realize is that it needs a court to decide that," Slater told the Telegraph Wednesday.Slater said the picture should not be in the public domain. "They've got no right to say that it's public domain. A monkey pressed the button, but I did all the setting up," he said.But Wikimedia countered, saying, "To claim copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial contributions to the final image, and even then, they'd only have copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image. This means that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls into the public domain."
