A macaque took the selfie, but the law says nobody authored it
In the 2010s a crested macaque grabbed a nature photographer's camera and snapped pictures of itself. The photographer claimed them as his work. The United States Copyright Office said no: authorship requires a human being. That tidy rule now faces harder cases, since generative AI produces images and text nobody quite wrote.
Legally, an author is whoever creates an original published work, whether a novel, a painting, a sculpture or a piece of music. The author is normally the first owner of the copyright, which grants the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute it; anyone else needs permission and often has to pay. There are exceptions. In a work for hire, such as a tour guide commissioned by a city council, the employer counts as the author. Heirs can inherit a copyright and its benefits without ever becoming authors themselves.
The modern idea began with the Statute of Anne in 1710, which named the author as sole creator of a literary work. It protected wording, not ideas, so a writer could borrow another's plot wholesale as long as the sentences were different. The US Constitution later let Congress secure rights to authors for limited times, language drawn from proposals by Charles Pinckney and James Madison. Those limits have been stretched repeatedly, largely following American law, where publishing and entertainment lobbies are strong.
Literary theorists went further and questioned whether the author matters at all. In his 1968 essay on the death of the author, Roland Barthes argued that language speaks, not the writer, and that any text weaves together countless cultural quotations. Michel Foucault replied the next year that every author is a writer but not every writer is an author: a private letter has someone who signed it, not an author. For him the name works as a function that shapes how a text circulates and is valued.
Commercially, authors are paid in several ways. Royalties may be a percentage of the price or of net receipts, sometimes held back until enough copies sell, while established names may get advances. Self-publishers bear every cost themselves. Vanity presses charge authors to print, a model Bill Henderson described in 1983 as publishing anything a writer will pay for, usually at a loss to the writer.
Source: Author
