Well, this is both strange and surreal and fascinating: Who Owns A Monkey’s Selfie? No One Can, U.S. Says : The Two-Way : NPR. Turns out the UC Copyright office says a photo taken by a monkey cannot by copyrighted because apparently copyright is reserved for humans (and I guess human corporations). NPR implies that an Ars Technica article by David Kravets is what caught their attention as well as that of others.
I wonder – if one could teach a monkey to type maybe one could get them to type up some papers and then nobody could have copyright on them? What if one wrote a paper where a monkey was a co-author but did not do all the work? Would that mean one could not transfer copyright to anyone else? Seems like I should / could include monkeys on all my work.
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
I like this plan. You could probably get monkeys to play things like FOLDIT (http://fold.it/portal/) – the first publication out of that game had all the players as co-authors. Monkeys are probably still better than computers for some things requiring abstract reasoning (at least for now).
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The problem is when you train monkeys to type, they just type out-of-copyright stuff like “Hamlet” anyway.
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Well, at least one paper co-authored by a hamster does exist (dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0921-4526(00)00753-5), but is still protected by the paywall
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