https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180525/23110739918/monkey-selfie-lawsuit-will-never-ever-die-appeals-court-judge-wants-do-over.shtml

Last fall, I joked (no, really, it was a fucking joke!) that the monkey selfie saga "will never, ever be over." I stand by that prediction, even if Cathy Gellis wrote here last month with what she falsely believed was "the last update from the monkey selfie case". She wrote that because the 9th Circuit -- after rejecting a problematic settlement between PETA and photographer David Slater because Naruto, the apparent monkey in the middle had clearly not approved of any settlement -- had clearly and decisively rejected PETA's ridiculous argument. The court found no reason to believe that PETA (being a "next friend" of the monkey) should get the monkey's copyright for taking the selfie. The court said -- as we've said from the very beginning -- that monkeys don't get copyright.

Several provisions of the Copyright Act also persuade us against the conclusion that animals have statutory standing to sue under the Copyright Act. See Davis v. Mich. Dep’t of Treasury, 489 U.S. 803, 809 (1989) (“It is a fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.”). For example, the “children” of an “author,” “whether legitimate or not,” can inherit certain rights under the Copyright Act. See 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 201, 203, 304. Also, an author’s “widow or widower owns the author’s entire termination interest unless there are any surviving children or grandchildren of the author, in which case the widow or widower owns one-half of the author’s interest.” Id. § 203(a)(2)(A). The terms “children,” “grandchildren,” “legitimate,” “widow,” and “widower” all imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals that do not marry and do not have heirs entitled to property by law. Based on this court’s decision in Cetacean and the text of the Copyright Act as a whole, the district court did not err in concluding that Naruto—and, more broadly, animals other than humans—lack statutory standing to sue under the Copyright Act.