British nature photographer David Slater was in Indonesia in 2011 shooting images crested black macaque when one of the more interesting events occurred. “They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button,” he said at the time. “The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At first it scared the rest of them away, but they soon came back – it was amazing to watch.”

“He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn’t worked that out yet.” While almost all of the resulting shots were blurry or pointed at the jungle floor, a handful of amazing focused images were recovered, including a selfie taken by a grinning female macaque which made headlines around the world.

But after appearing on websites, newspapers, magazines and television shows around the world, Mr Slater is now facing a legal battle with Wikimedia. The US-based organization behind Wikipedia, has refused the photographer’s repeated requests to remove his images which are online without his permission, claiming that because a monkey pressed the shutter button, it should own the copyright.

Despite the image’s enormous popularity, Mr. Slater has not made a lot of money due to the legal limbo forced by upon him by Wikimedia. “They’re taking our livelihoods away,” Slater said. “For every 10,000 images I take, one makes money that keeps me going. And that was one of those images. It was like a year of work, really.”

The image has been removed in the past. But Wikimedia editors decided that Mr Slater has no claim on the image. The monkey itself took the picture. Mr Slater now faces an estimated £10,000 legal bill to take the matter to court to decide whether public domain or private copyright should be given to the image.

“If the monkey took it, it owns copyright, not me, that’s their basic argument. What they don’t realize is that it needs a court to decide that,” he said.