In San Francisco, a federal court ruled that a crested macaque named Naruto could not hold copyright to a series of self-portrait photographs taken with wildlife photographer David Slater's camera in Indonesia. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had filed the lawsuit on Naruto's behalf, arguing that the monkey was the author of the photographs because he had intentionally triggered the shutter. The court held that copyright law does not extend to non-human animals, a question that had never been legally tested.

The Naruto case entered literary culture as an absurdist legal boundary-pushing exercise that raised profound questions about authorship, intentionality, and creativity—questions at the heart of poetic theory. The case resonated with conceptual and experimental poets who challenge conventional notions of authorship, and it influenced contemporary poetry's engagement with non-human perspectives, animal rights, and the question of whether creative agency requires human consciousness—themes explored in ecopoetry from the 2010s onward.