"... the monkey had taken the photo, and was therefore the real copyright owner."
The fact that non-human primates can now supposedly hold copyrights is my big take-away from this.
"The term "authorship" implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable."
Was the photo really produced "solely" by the animal? No. You couldn't exactly say that a monkey with a camera lives in a natural environment.
The real talent here was preparing the camera for primate use, giving the camera to the monkey, somehow getting it back, and developing the photo. The work absolutely owes its origin to a human being. This is an unambiguous case: the man owns the copyright.
Laws aren't generally written in some context-agnostic way, like a philosophy class works out after a bull session. Its lawyers writing about what's at issue at the time.
With an aside that if it's not public domain, the Indonesian government is actually the most likely copyright holder
But, assuming for purposes of argument, that something neither a person nor a legal entity can somehow copyright a photo, I'm willing to bet that said monkey didn't release that photo under an appropriate license for Wikimedia to use. So if the monkey does own the copyright, Wikimedia still doesn't have the right to use it.
(Perhaps it's also worth noting that the monkeys weren't "taking selfies" per se; they were simply fiddling with the camera and noticed that pressing a button made a sound.)
It's really a fascinating corner case. On the one hand, I agree that the photo almost has to be considered to be in the public domain. On the other hand, the photographer did exercise effort and choice in retrieving his camera, finding the one (hilariously adorable) image in the several that the monkeys inadvertently took, and making it available as a photograph. (Not to mention cropping and rotating the raw photo to properly frame the monkey. But one could ignore that by focusing on the original image, which isn't shown in the article but is floating around the web.)
I suspect that if this exact situation had happened forty years, back when photos still had to be chemically developed, nobody would think for a second that the photographer didn't have full copyright ownership. He may not have exercised intent, but without his efforts there would be no photograph. It's only now, when the process of turning a camera's image into a viewable artifact has become relatively transparent, that it becomes less clear what the human photographer has contributed.
However, how is that really different if--in this case--the photographer had deliberately given a bunch of monkeys cameras that they could fool around with and take pictures of each other or whatnot? In both cases, you're essentially creating the opportunity for autonomous entities to take photos under only somewhat understood conditions. And how different is that really from this case?
Levels of abstraction and indirection in the creative process. Do you draw a line somewhere?
(Mind you, in this case, IMO there's a pretty clear presumption that the human photographer owns the copyright and Wikimedia is playing with fiddly legalisms that aren't appropriate in this context.)
Reminds me of Inspector Clouseau's encounter with an organ grinder.
"I am a musician and the monkey is a businessman. He doesn't tell me what to play, and I don't tell him what to do with his money."
They also put a poll there for people to vote on who owns the copyright and the monkey is currently leading, but it's close.