In 2011, photographer David Slater was in Indonesia when a crested black macaque grabbed his camera and took some pictures, including this awesome selfie. It was a viral sensation. But who owns the copyright? Wikipedia argues that no one does. The war for the rights to this picture continue to this day, as now People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has filed suit to grant the rights to the monkey, identified as 6-year-old Naruto.

Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office issued an updated compendium of its policies, including a section stipulating that it would register copyrights only for works produced by human beings. It specified that works produced by animals, whether a photo taken by a monkey or a mural painted by an elephant, would not qualify.

However, Jeffrey Kerr, a lawyer with PETA, said the copyright office policy "is only an opinion," and the U.S. Copyright Act itself does not contain language limiting copyrights to humans.

Slater said he is “very saddened” by PETA’s lawsuit.

(Image credit: David Slater and/or unnamed macaque via Wikimedia Commons)

To promote The Peanuts Movie that will hit theaters November 6, 20th Century Fox has a generator with which you can customize a Peanuts character. Select facial expression, hair, clothing, and backgrounds to suit yourself. This one is as close as I can get to one that resembles me. Try Peanutize Me -and feel free to share the finished product with us.  -via Flavorwire

The song we know as  “Happy Birthday to You” has been around since the 19th century, with various lyrics. The version we know was first published in 1911, and was copyrighted in 1935. Warner/Chappell Music acquired that copyright in 1988. You may have noticed that restaurant chains don’t sing that song when it’s your birthday, and you rarely see it in movies. That’s because Warner/Chappell Music wants to collect royalties every time it’s performed in public. But that changed today, as a federal judge declared the song to be in the public domain.

The class action lawsuit that produced Tuesday’s ruling began when documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson was told she would have to pay $1,500 to use “Happy Birthday to You.” The suit claimed that the song was actually in the public domain.

According to [Attorney Mark] Rifkin, the “smoking gun” in the case turned up when Warner/Chappell Music handed over documents that included a publication of the song from the early 1920s. That publication predates the 1935 copyright.

The final result was that the judge ruled Warner/Chappell Music’s copyright extends only to specific arrangements, not to the song itself.

Rifkin said the next phase in the case will be determining whether or not Warner/Chappell Music has to pay back the money it collected over the years from exercising the copyright.

Read more about the song’s history and today’s ruling at Buzzfeed. 

(Image credit: Fir0002)

Is there any truth to the rumor that donut holes are getting smaller? Or is it just a crackpot conspiracy -a “donutspiracy,” if you will. Phil Edwards takes a look at the historical record and concedes that yes, the holes in donuts appear to be much smaller in the 1950s than they were during World War I. Since a hole is a negative space, that’s a good thing. And there are a few possible reasons for the shrinking holes, which you can read about at Vox. -via Daily of the Day

(Image credit: Sally L. Steinberg Collection of Doughnut Ephemera, Archives Center, National Museum of American History)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

On February 11, 1963, four fresh-faced, young (one of them wasn't even 20 yet) musicians trooped into EMI studios to record their first studio album. It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that the four lads were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison (still a teenager, at 19) and Ringo Starr. They called themselves the Beatles and they were about the change the face of the rock album forevermore.

As we look at the cover of Please Please Me, we see four incredibly naive and innocent-looking young chaps (and maybe they were at the time, but things would change quicker than any of them could ever imagine within the next few short months).

On the cover, looking down from the EMI studio stairwell, John, Paul, and George sport what would soon be recognized around the world as "the Beatle haircut" (combed down in bangs), while, strangely, Ringo's hair is still upswept in the more fifties-style of the times.

The album was originally conceived to be called Off the Beatle Track. Beatle producer George Martin was a member of the Zoological Society of London and his original idea was for the boys to be photographed at the insect house of the London Zoo (see, their name was "the Beatles"  ... insects- get it?) it turned out to be a moot idea, as the society turned down his request to have the band shoot their cover shot there anyway.)

The boys were rushed into the studio to record in order to capitalize on the recent success of their first two singles: “Please Please Me” (the album's namesake), which had reached the #1 spot on every chart except one, and “Love Me Do,” their first single, which had charted at #17.

Harry Potter fans know an awful lot about Harry, but very little about his family background. How did a kid who inherited magic powers end up with a Muggle name, anyway? As an orphan raised by Muggles, Harry himself doesn’t know much about his ancestors, either. But JK Rowling knows. Today she posted a look at the Potter family history and genealogy that explains the name and where all that money came from. Both have been around for a long time.  

In the Muggle world ‘Potter’ is an occupational surname, meaning a man who creates pottery. The wizarding family of Potters descends from the twelfth-century wizard Linfred of Stinchcombe, a locally well-beloved and eccentric man, whose nickname, ‘the Potterer’, became corrupted in time to ‘Potter’. Linfred was a vague and absent-minded fellow whose Muggle neighbours often called upon his medicinal services. None of them realised that Linfred’s wonderful cures for pox and ague were magical; they all thought him a harmless and lovable old chap, pottering about in his garden with all his funny plants. His reputation as a well-meaning eccentric served Linfred well, for behind closed doors he was able to continue the series of experiments that laid the foundation of the Potter family’s fortune. Historians credit Linfred as the originator of a number of remedies that evolved into potions still used to this day, including Skele-gro and Pepperup Potion. His sales of such cures to fellow witches and wizards enabled him to leave a significant pile of gold to each of his seven children upon his death.

A few more generations are covered (and more money amassed) before we get to Harry’s father. You can read the rest at Pottermore. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The best time to grow a beard is when they are in style, I guess, but that makes no difference at all if you can’t grow one. If you can’t by age 30, you probably never will. Luckily, you can hide that fact by acting like you never wanted a beard. Imagine being in a culture in which every man grows a beard, except you! This comic is from Justin Boyd at Invisible Bread.

A TV detective may say “I have a theory that the murderer may be someone in this room.” The way he’s using the word “theory” isn’t the way the word is used in science. The words “fact” and “hypothesis” and “law” suffer from the same difference in perception and meaning between scientists and non-scientists.

(YouTube link)

Joe Hanson, Ph.D. of the PBS Digital Studios channel It’s Okay to Be Smart explains the way science uses these words. Understanding the difference is one thing, explaining it to someone else is hard. Hanson does a pretty good job, but it will be much easier for us to send someone the video than to explain it the way he does. -via Digg

Here’s something you’ll certainly want to try when you get home from work. Take your shoes off, lay on the bed, close your eyes, and have a loved one touch your toes one at a time in more or less random order. Can you identify which toe is being touched? You’ll be forgiven if you make mistakes, because most people do. When this experiment was done at the University of Oxford, none of the subjects could name the touched toes perfectly.

In similar experiments performed in the past with fingers, people were able to identify the digit being prodded correctly 99 percent of the time. In this new set of experiments, that figure fell to 94 percent for big and little toes.

But the ones in the middle? It was just 57, 60 and 79 percent for the second, third and fourth toe respectively. Perhaps most amazingly, not a single participant was able to identify which of their toes was being prodded 100 percent of the time and some people could only get the right answer 20 percent of time. The results are published in the journal Perception.

These intriguing results bring up more questions than they answer. Would people who go barefoot every day do better? How about people with no arms who use their feet for things the rest of us use our hands for? Or ballet dancers? Or apes (if they could communicate their answers to researchers)? One thing is for sure- people will go out of their way to be the first to score 100%, even if it’s only in the privacy of their homes.  

(Image credit: Flickr user Basheer Tome)

What is it about cat videos that we love so much? They make up a substantial part of the internet, and a good one can make a cat into a famous celebrity and make its owner rich. Maria Bustillos wrote a thoughtful essay that gets to the heart of the matter.  

Before we enter into the question of cat videos, we must talk about cats themselves. Cat videos are the crystallisation of all that human beings love about cats, the crux of which is centred in the fact that cats are both beautiful and absurd. Their natural beauty and majesty are eternally just one tiny slip away from total humiliation, and this precarious condition fills us with a sympathetic panic and delight, for it exactly mirrors our own.

She goes on to give specific examples.

Maru is so resplendently beautiful, so thickly furred and magnificent, and so utterly mellow that even watching mugumogu clean his ears with q-tips is an entirely relaxing and pleasurable experience. But Maru is also a kook, and it is this kookiness that is responsible for the love his legion of fans bears him. Maru is perfectly capable of making a fool of himself over a bit of string, and he can fall off a cat tree with the best of them – but it is his determination to inhabit every available box, no matter how small or inconveniently situated, that seals his greatness and ensures his immortality.

And then she explains the wonder of internet videos themselves, and how funny cat videos can lead to world peace, among other things. The essay called “Hope is a Thing with Fur” is from her book Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong. Read the rest of it at the BBC. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: I Am Maru)

Do you recall the Italian grandmas who reviewed Olive Garden food? They’re back! And they’re getting Disney Princess makeovers.

(YouTube link)

You may think this is a silly concept, but as the video goes on, you learn that these women grew up during hard times and never got the chance to play dress-up or fantasize about the royal life. They are cute and sassy and deserve some silliness in their lives. -Thanks, Ricky Sans!

New leader for pumpkins and new North American record - 2145.5 pounds by Gene McMullen pic.twitter.com/YFQULjzLDP

— GPC (@GPCpumpkin) September 19, 2015

Gene McMullen set a new North American record with his 2145-pound pumpkin, officially weighed at the Cedarburg Wine & Harvest Festival in Wisconsin last weekend. McMullen, a factory worker from Illinois, explains his success as “dumb luck.” He grew a 1,600-pound pumpkin last year. You have to wonder how many pies could be made from that one pumpkin.

Father Damien was a Belgian Catholic priest who went to the Hawaiian island of Molokai to minister to the patients of the leper colony in 1873. He served there until he died -of leprosy- in 1889. Father Damien became Saint Damien of Molokai in 2009. To achieved sainthood, there must be at least two miracles attributed to the saint's intercession, among other requirements. Father Damien's first certified miracle was in 1895. The second only came about in 1998 when Audrey Toguchi was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After praying to Father Damien, subsequent x-rays showed the cancer in her lungs shrinking, then disappearing.

Like many Hawaiians both religious and secular, Dr. Chang admired Father Damien deeply and had followed the news of his slow progress towards sainthood. Although Dr. Chang hesitated to believe in miracles, he was convinced that for the Catholic Church, at least, the x-rays and biopsies of Mrs. Toguchi’s cure might be seen as evidence of Damien’s presence in heaven. Those who know Dr. Chang well remark how his convictions can turn into obsessions. “When my father believes he’s correct,” says his son Carter, also a doctor, “he will debate or argue till he is proven right or the other person gives up and turns away.”

Dr. Chang approached Father Christopher Keahi, the Sacred Hearts priest who had first suggested that Audrey Toguchi pray to Damien, and whose hilltop office outside Honolulu is today cluttered with pencil portraits, paintings, and busts of the priest. In a letter that Father Keahi later wrote to a Sacred Hearts representative in Rome, he recalled the talk with Dr. Chang: “he told me when we met that he would challenge any physician to debate him in regards to Audrey’s case,” reported Keahi. “I tried to subdue his enthusiasm by reminding him that Rome treats such cases with meticulous and methodical examination.”

The story of that meticulous and methodical investigation into Toguchi’s miracle is detailed at Atlas Obscura, along with an account of the life of Father Damien.

The 1943 song “You’ll Never Know” was always special to Laura and Howard Serena. She sang it to him as he left for World War II. She sang it to herself for comfort while he gone to war. They sang it together at their 50th anniversary party. At family gatherings, they would sing it to each other, alternating verses. Laura is 93 years old now, and blind. Howard is 92 and uses a wheelchair. When Howard visited her hospice room, he sang the song to her again.  

(YouTube link)

Their granddaughter Erin Solari recorded the moment. Things have changed a little bit since then.

She said the response to the video, which was first posted on Facebook, was an “outpouring of love [which] lifted everyone's spirits” and eventually convinced the hospice staff that she was well enough to go home to spend her final days with her husband.

Warning: onion cutting. -via Metafilter

A bucket can be a wonderful toy for an animal, as a certain walrus could tell you. Cats, too. This 8-month-old polar bear cub at the Maruyama Zoo in Japan has her favorite toy out to play with. But why does it have a hole in it?

(YouTube link)

Because it’s also a helmet! There’s no end to the things a bear can do with a bucket. -via Tastefully Offensive