Originally posted by dcshooter The problem is that the current legal thinking is that none of those would likely be considered "authorship." Think about it this way: You set up your camera with all the perfect settings, then hand it to your friend who takes a picture. Your friend owns the copyright, since he is the "author" in that case.
So here, we have an image produced with no human "author," so the initial image passes into the public domain automatically.
Everything post facto (postprocessing, etc.) might arguably be considered a derivative work. For works where the original is copyrighted, the copyright holder has the exclusive right to authorize derivative works. However, derivative works of PD originals are copyrightable on their own. The key, then, is that the difference between the original and the derivative work must be "substantially" new and not trivially different from the original, in which case it would fall into the public domain as well. The question then is whether a postprocessed photo of a RAW original is transformative enough in the eyes of the law to constitute a substantially new work.
From what I can tell, the current PETA lawsuit is claiming that the images
aren't PD, but that the macaque is the copyright owner, and Slater owes the macaque royalties for using the images. That they are only going after the guy who owns the equipment used to create the images and previously unsuccessfully claimed ownership, rather than everyone using the images for free (like Wikipedia), is more than just ironic, and further weakens their case IMO.