And the Award goes to Naruto..... A Monkey??!!!

Yes, Peta’s 2017 Person of the Year is Naruto, the monkey who clicked his selfies…

Naruto, the monkey who had picked up a camera and inadvertently clicked pictures of itself, has been named 2017 Person of the Year by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The animal rights organisation said it was honouring the Indonesian black macaque to recognise that “he is someone, not something”.

~~Reported by Scroll.in

The whole story begins, when our innocent Naruto unintentionally (I know Naruto, it was intentional, as you know for yourself that, you are super cute and handsome...look at your smile…”cho chweet”) captured his own pic using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater.

There started the dispute, actually a copyright dispute.

~~From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia it can be read as follows:

For detailed reading, visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute

The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images over Slater's objections, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright.

Slater has argued that he has a valid copyright claim based on the fact that 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" picture might come about. The Wikimedia Foundation's 2014 refusal to remove the pictures from its Wikimedia Commons image library was based on the understanding that copyright is held by the creator, that a non-human creator (not being a legal person) cannot hold copyright, and that the images are thus in the public domain. In December 2014, the United States Copyright Office stated that works created by a non-human, such as a photograph taken by a monkey, are not copyrightable. A number of legal experts in the US and UK have nevertheless argued that Slater's role in the process that led to the pictures being taken may have been sufficient to establish a valid copyright claim, stating that this is a decision that would have to be made by a court.

In a separate dispute PETA has tried to use the monkey selfies to establish a legal precedent that animals can be declared copyright holders. Slater had published a book containing the photographs through self-publishing company Blurb, Inc. In September 2015, PETA filed a lawsuit against Slater and Blurb, requesting that the monkey be assigned copyright and that PETA be appointed to administer proceeds from the photos for the endangered species' benefit. In 2016, a judge ruled that the monkey cannot own the copyright to the images. PETA appealed, and in September 2017, all sides agreed to a settlement in which Slater will donate a portion of future revenues on the photographs to wildlife organizations.

Slater stated in July 2017 that as a result of the pictures having been made freely available for commercial re-use on Wikimedia Commons and the PETA lawsuit, he had lost "£10,000 or more in income" and that it was "killing his business" as a wildlife photographer.

And the whole dispute ended up well, by allowing the photographer the copyright, for the selfie of Naruto.

And here comes another news that Naruto wins PETA’s 2017 person of the year title.

Naruto… you heard the news right??..Congrats Bro!!..

The famous grinning selfie taken by Naruto David J Slater/Caters News Agency