(CNN) The case of the world's most litigious selfie has come to a close.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and photographer David Slater have reached a settlement in a dispute over who owns the rights to a selfie of a monkey.

The photograph was taken in 2011 by a 7-year-old crested macaque named Naruto.

Naruto took Slater's camera while he was on assignment in Indonesia and snapped a photograph of himself with it, court documents say.

The animal rights organization had argued that by republishing the photo Naturo's rights were being infringed.

Read More</s>Lawyers for photographer, animal-rights group settle claim over who owns copyright to photographs taken by monkey.</s>A lawsuit exploring whether animals own the copyright to their own selfies is finally over.

The bizarre legal journey began when a crested macaque monkey named Naruto took selfies using British nature photographer David Slater's camera during a 2011 trip to Indonesia. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sued Slater and self-publishing company Blurb in 2015, arguing the monkey owned the copyright to the photos and proposing it administer all proceeds for the benefit of the monkey.

As part of a settlement announced Monday, the photos will belong to Slater, but he will donate 25 percent of future revenue derived from the image to charities that protect Naruto and other crested macaque monkeys.

"PETA and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for nonhuman animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal," the parties said in a joint statement.

The photo, captured when monkey grabbed Slater's camera, posed and clicked, became an instant hit appearing in newspapers, magazines, websites and on TV shows around the world. But it took a controversial turn when Slater threatened to sue Wikimedia, a database of millions of images, videos, and audio files that are free for anyone to use.

Slater was frustrated that Wikimedia, the US-based nonprofit behind Wikipedia, told him he didn't own the copyright to the image, thereby depriving him of revenue from licensing the image for publication. Last year, a federal judge ruled the monkey didn't own the copyright to the photos.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals took up the case in July, with the San Francisco panel asking PETA's attorney why the group should represent the monkey's interests.

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

Technically Literate: Original works of short fiction with unique perspectives on tech, exclusively on CNET.</s>Attorneys representing a macaque monkey have agreed to a compromise in a case where they asserted the animal owned the copyright to selfie photos it had shot with a photographer’s camera.

Under the deal, the photographer agreed to donate 25 per cent of any future revenue from the images to charities dedicated to protecting crested macaques in Indonesia, said the lawyers from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who filed the lawsuit.

Attorneys for the group and the photographer, David Slater, on Monday asked the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the case and throw out a lower-court decision that said animals cannot own copyrights.
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Andrew J. Dhuey, an attorney for Slater, declined to comment on how much money the photos have generated or whether Slater would keep all of the remaining 75 per cent of future revenue.

“PETA and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for non-human animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal,” Slater and PETA said in a joint statement.

There was no immediate ruling from the 9th Circuit on the dismissal.

PETA sued on behalf of the monkey in 2015, seeking financial control of the photographs for the benefit of the monkey named Naruto that snapped the photos with Slater’s camera.

Lawyers for Slater argued that his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd., owns worldwide commercial rights to the photos, including a now-famous selfie of the monkey’s toothy grin.

The photos were taken during a 2011 trip to Sulawesi, Indonesia, with an unattended camera owned by Slater. Slater said the British copyright obtained for the photos by Wildlife Personalities should be honoured worldwide.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said in a ruling in favour of Slater last year that “while Congress and the president can extend the protection of law to animals as well as humans, there is no indication that they did so in the Copyright Act.” The 9th Circuit was considering PETA’s appeal.

The lawyers notified the appeals court on Aug. 4 that they were nearing a settlement and asked the judges not to rule. A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit heard oral arguments in the case in July.</s>A bizarre two-year court battle over who owns the copyright of a “monkey selfie” which went viral was finally settled on Monday — in favour of a British nature photographer.

A black macaque with a goofy grin snapped itself in Indonesia while staring down the lens of camera belonging to David Slater in 2011.

After Slater published the pictures in a book, animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco in 2015 seeking to have the monkey “declared the author and owner of his photograph”.

PETA said the selfies were taken by a six-year-old called Naruto on the island of Sulawesi, although even the identity of the monkey was the subject of legal wranglings.

In filing the lawsuit, PETA argued that “US copyright law doesn’t prohibit an animal from owning a copyright, and since Naruto took the photo, he owns the copyright, as any human would”.

Slater insisted that he owned the rights since he set up the tripod and walked away for a few minutes, only to find out that the monkey had grabbed his camera and snapped away.

Following the settlement, PETA wrote on their blog: “As a part of the arrangement, Slater agreed to donate 25 percent of any future revenue derived from using or selling the monkey selfies to charities that protect the habitat of Naruto and other crested macaques in Indonesia.”

It added: “Naruto and the famous ‘monkey selfie’ photographs that he undeniably took clearly demonstrate that he and his fellow macaques … are highly intelligent, thinking, sophisticated beings worthy of having legal ownership of their own intellectual property and holding other rights as members of the legal community.”

A joint statement read: “PETA and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for nonhuman animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal.”

When the copyright controversy erupted, Slater said that the widespread distribution of the photos online had cost him a lot of money by robbing his book of potential sales — so it’s unclear how much money the habitat charities will clear in the deal.

Slater’s company Wildlife Personalities, and the self-publishing platform Blurb were co-defendants in the case.</s>The British wildlife photographer David Slater has reached a settlement with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a long-running copyright case over a photo of a macaque monkey, taken by the monkey on Slater's camera in the Indonesian jungle.

The monkey, a crested macaque named Naruto, took the selfie in 2011. A few years later, Slater tried to get the Wikimedia Foundation to remove the shot from Wikipedia, but the foundation refused, arguing that the monkey had taken the shot, so no-one held the copyright to it and it was therefore in the public domain.

At the end of 2014, the U.S. Copyright Office confirmed that works created by non-humans are not copyrightable.

PETA then jumped on board, suing Slater in the monkey's name , in an attempt to get U.S. courts to assign the copyright to the monkey as a legal precedent for the rights of animals.

A federal judge denied PETA's monkey-copyright attempt at the start of 2016, so the group took the case up to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco "on the monkey's behalf."

As part of the settlement, Slater agreed to donate 25% of any future revenue he earns from the "monkey selfies" to charities that protect crested black macaques in Indonesia.

"PETA’s groundbreaking case sparked a massive international discussion about the need to extend fundamental rights to animals for their own sake, not in relation to how they can be exploited by humans," PETA general counsel Jeff Kerr said in a statement.

However, PETA did not get its legal precedent, as the 9th Circuit did not make a ruling.</s>(SAN FRANCISCO) — Attorneys announced a settlement Monday in a lawsuit over who owns the copyright to selfie photographs taken by a monkey before a federal appeals court could answer the novel legal question.

Under the deal, the photographer whose camera was used to take the photos agreed to donate 25 percent of any future revenue from the images to charities dedicated to protecting crested macaques in Indonesia, lawyers for an animal-rights group said.

Attorneys for the group and the photographer, David Slater, asked the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the case and throw out a lower court decision that said animals cannot own copyrights.

Andrew J. Dhuey, an attorney for Slater, declined to comment on how much money the photos have generated or whether Slater would keep all of the remaining 75 percent of future revenue.

There was no immediate ruling from the 9th Circuit.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued on behalf of the macaque monkey in 2015, seeking financial control of the photographs for the benefit of the monkey named Naruto that snapped the photos with Slater's camera.

"PETA and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for non-human animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal," Slater and PETA said in a joint statement.

Lawyers for Slater argued that his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd., owns worldwide commercial rights to the photos, including a now-famous selfie of the monkey's toothy grin.

The photos were taken during a 2011 trip to Sulawesi, Indonesia, with an unattended camera owned by Slater.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said in a ruling in favor of Slater last year that "while Congress and the president can extend the protection of law to animals as well as humans, there is no indication that they did so in the Copyright Act." The 9th Circuit was considering PETA's appeal.

The lawyers notified the appeals court on Aug. 4 that they were nearing a settlement and asked the judges not to rule. A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit heard oral arguments in the case in July.</s>British photographer, David Slater, was sued over a monkey selfie and in a legal settlement, he agreed to donate 25 percent of any future revenue from the images to charities dedicated to protecting crested macaques in Indonesia. In this photo, a tourist poses for a selfie in front of a monkey at the top of Gibraltar Rock on April 4, 2017 in Gibraltar, Europe.

A lawsuit between a British wildlife photographer and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) over a "monkey selfie" was settled Monday, after the appeal judges at a court in San Francisco threw out the organization's appeal on "behalf of the animal" for copyright to the image.

A lawsuit which began in 2015 questioned whether animals own the copyright to their own selfies.

The seeds of the legal battle between Slater and PETA were sown when a crested macaque monkey took selfies with Slater's camera during his visit to Indonesia in 2011, reports said.

PETA claimed while suing Slater and his self-publishing company Blurb in 2015 that the monkey named Naruto owned the copyright to the photographs under the U.S. Copyright Act.

"In this case, Naruto —who has been accustomed to cameras throughout his life—saw himself in the reflection of the lens, drew the connection between pressing the shutter release and the change in his reflection, and made different facial expressions while pressing the shutter release," a press release of the animal rights organization stated.

Though the lawsuit ended with Slater's win, he agreed to donate 25 percent of future revenue derived from the monkey images to charities that protect Naruto and other such crested macaque monkeys.

In a joint statement, both PETA and Slater agreed on the fundamental issues about "expanding legal rights for non-human animals" that this case presented. They both agreed to continue work toward this aspect of animal rights.

The monkey selfie images created quite a stir when it first appeared in newspapers, magazines, websites and TV shows. The image was captured when Naruto grabbed Slater's camera, posed for a photograph and then pressed the "click" button.

However, things started to turn sour when Slater asked Wikimedia — a database of millions of images, videos, and audio files that are free for anyone to use — to remove one of his images used online and it refused to do so, the Telegraph reported.

Its argument that since Naruto pressed the shutter button, the monkey should own the copyright and not Slater, led to a copyrights dispute.

Since Wikimedia, the U.S.-based not-for-profit behind Wikipedia, refused to recognize Slater's copyright on the image, the photographer said it deprived him of revenue from licensing them for publication.

Slater said: "There's no consideration of the effort, the skill, the technological knowledge behind it, the vision...(Wikimedia) are ruining my income stream in doing this".

The U.S. Copyright Office ruled that animals cannot own copyrights.

“Every photographer dreams of a photograph like this,” Slater had said of the monkey selfie image. He added: “If everybody gave me a pound for every time they used [the photograph], I’d probably have £40 million in my pocket. The proceeds from these photographs should have me comfortable now, and I’m not," according to the Guardian.

Slater said he lost a lot of money as a result of being dragged through courts for more than five years.

In July, he told the newspaper he was working as a freelance photographer, which was tough for him but he also said economic stability was "once tantalizingly within reach."

He also said he was trying to become a tennis coach. "I’m even thinking about doing dog walking. I don’t make enough money to pay income tax," he said, according to the Guardian.
• Photographer Sued By Monkey Over Selfie Says He Is Broke</s>A British photographer won a two-year-long legal battle against animal rights group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals in the United States over a “monkey selfie”, BBC reported on Tuesday.

A macaque monkey had picked up a camera owned by David Slater, and had inadvertently taken several images of itself in an Indonesian jungle in 2011. Peta had filed a petition on the “monkey’s behalf’’, claiming copyright protection for the animal.

However, the judges ruled that the monkey was not entitled to copyright protection. While the court rejected Peta’s argument that the monkey should benefit from the proceeds of the photograph, Slater said he would donate 25% of any future earnings from the photograph to registered charitable organisations.

While Peta claimed that the monkey in the image was a female called Naruto, Slater had said it was a different male macaque. The case was listed as Naruto v David Slater.

In a joint statement, Peta and Slater said the case had raised the debate over legal rights for animals. “Peta and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for non-human animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal.”</s>A settlement was announced Monday in the lawsuit over who owned the rights to a selfie taken by a monkey.

The odd case gained worldwide attention after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued, claiming copyright infringement and arguing that since an Indonesian crested macaque named Naruto had taken the photo, the animal owned the copyright.

Attorneys for PETA, nature photographer David Slater and self-publishing site Blurb.com announced in a joint statement Monday that the animal-rights group would drop its appeal of the suit, and that Slater had agreed to donate 25% of future earnings from the photo to charities to protect the primates.

“PETA and David Slater agree that this case raises important, cutting-edge issues about expanding legal rights for nonhuman animals, a goal that they both support, and they will continue their respective work to achieve this goal,” they said in the statement.

PETA had claimed that macaques were “sophisticated beings worthy of having legal ownership of their own intellectual property.”

Slater said he made the camera accessible to the macaques, hoping they would play with it and take photos, and argued that ownership rights belonged to his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd., which had published the photo in a book.

The case was pending before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, after a lower court in January 2016 sided with Slater, ruling that animals could not hold copyrights. PETA was appealing that ruling.
PETA and David Slater settle the monkey selfie copyright dispute.