July 12, 2011 5:08PM # Copyright Monkey Business By [Jim Harper](https://www.cato.org/people/jim-harper) --- SHARE Given enough time, a monkey sitting at a typewriter will type out the complete works of William Shakespeare. Believe it or not, it’s called the [infinite monkey theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem). A thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters would cut the time in half … or something. But would the monkey hold the copyright? We may soon find out. Or at least we’ll be [entertained by the tiff](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110712/01182015052/monkeys-dont-do-fair-use-news-agency-tells-techdirt-to-remove-photos.shtml) between *TechDirt*’s Mike Masnick and a person claiming to represent the owner of a photograph taken by, yes, a monkey. The short answers are: 1) A photograph taken by a monkey probably isn’t copyrighted, and 2) if it were, displaying the photo in a discussion of its copyright status is probably fair use. The lesson is: many, many people don’t understand what the copyright laws are, or why they are. Mike participated in our “[Copyright Controversies](https://www.cato.org/events/060426conf.html)” conference some years ago. Should there be a sequel, we’ll invite the monkey. ##### Related Tags [Technology and Privacy](https://www.cato.org/technology-privacy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).