THERE WAS NEVER ANY DOUBT ABOUT IT – A MONKEY CAN’T OWN A COPYRIGHT, PERIOD

I am by no means an authority on copyright law.  For advice on all matters of intellectual property, I rely on my firm's resident intellectual property practitioner, and recommend that you do the same (except when it comes to including your intellectual property in your estate plan, which I can handle).
But even I know enough to know that unless the federal law that establishes copyrights says that a non-human animal can own a copyright, a non-human animal can’t own a copyright.  That’s the end of it.  
But that didn’t deter PETA from filing a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco, asserting that “selfie monkey” (whose name, apparently, is Naruto, I suppose after the manga character) is the owner of the copyright to the famous photograph it supposedly took of itself.  
​PETA claimed to represent the interests of the monkey. Who appointed them the representatives of the monkey, anyway?
A federal judge in San Francisco brought a relatively swift end to PETA’s lawsuit, granting a motion to dismiss the case for the obvious reason I described above.
PETA of course had an ulterior motive for filing the lawsuit.  That motive is to establish that animals have legal rights that can be vindicated by humans (meaning PETA, of course) on behalf of the animals.