Hold your smartphone, smile at the front camera, and click! You get a selfie. There is no doubt that this photo is yours. But if a monkey takes a selfie, does the camera owner have the right to decide how to use it?

Recently, this question has caused a problem between Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, and British wildlife photographer David J. Slater.

In 2011, Slater was visiting a park in Indonesia when a macaque(猕猴) got hold of one of his cameras. “They were quite naughty, jumping all over my equipment,” Slater told The Telegraph, “and it looked like they were already posing for the   camera when one hit the button.” The result was hundreds of monkey selfies. The best of images was a female macaque grinning toothily into the lens.

This week, the grinning monkey selfie returned to the news when Wikimedia refused Slater’s request to take the photos down from Wikimedia Commons, a website that is run by the organization and offers free images.     5

According to Wikimedia, anyone who downloads the monkey selfie, or any of the millions of images on the site, can “copy and use any works here freely as long as they follow what the author says.” The question that arose here was whether Slater, who had not held the camera, set up the shot, or pressed the shutter(快门) button, could be considered the photographer of the monkey selfie. Wikimedia’s position on this was clear: as the work of a non-human animal, this photo has no human author who owns the copyright.”

Only authors of creative works, like a piece of writing or a song, own copyrights. In terms of photos, US copyright law says whoever pushes the button on the camera owns the copyright to the image produced, which means that if tourists ask you to take a photo of them, and you happen to hit the shutter button at the exact moment that Justin Bieber, a Canadian singer, made faces behind them. You, as the photographer, would have the photo’s copyright and sell it. The tourists, who own the camera on which the photo was taken and asked you to take the photo don’t get the right to use it without you allowing them to. All this has been complicated by the appearance of surveillance cameras(监控摄像头), smart phones, and large-scale photography projects for which assistants often press the shutter button to produce works whose copyrights belong to their boss.

Slater seems to be thinking along these lines. He says that buying the cameras, spending thousands of pounds to transport himself to Indonesia, and allowing the monkeys to “steal” his cameras makes him the author of the image, regardless of who pushed the button. “In law, if I have an assistant then I still own the copyright,” he told the “Today” Show. “I believe in this case, the monkey was my assistant.”

If that seems unfair, think about this. If a person left her laptop in a café, and a poet picked it up, opened up a word-processing program, and typed out a poem which turned out to be the best poem of this generation, could she ask for much more than her laptop back?

You get anxious if there, s no wi-fi in the hotel or mobile phone signal up the mountain. You feel upset if your phone is getting low on power, and you secretly worry things will go wrong at work if you’re not there. All these can be called “always on” stress caused by smartphone addiction.

For some people, smartphones have freed them from the nine-to-five work. Flexible working has given them more autonomy (自主权) in their working lives and enabled them to spend more time with their friends and families. For many others, though, smartphones have become tyrants (暴君) in their pockets, never allowing them to turn them off, relax and recharge their batteries.

Pittsburgh-based developer Kevin Holesh was worried about how much he was ignoring his family and friends in favour of his iPhone. So he developed an app — Moment — to monitor his usage. The app enables users to see how much time they’re spending on the device and set up warnings if the usage limits are breached (突破). “Moment’s goal is to promote balance in your life,” his website explains. “Some time on your phone, some time off it enjoying your loving family and friends around you.”

Dr Christine Grant, a psychologist at Coventry University, said, “The effects of this ‘always on, culture are that your mind is never resting, and you’re not giving your body time to recover, so you’re always stressed. And the more tired and stressed we get, the more mistakes we make. Physical and mental health can suffer.”

And as the number of connected smartphones is increasing, so is the amount of data. This is leading to a sort of decision paralysis (瘫痪) and is creating more stress in the workplace because people have to receive a broader range of data and communications which are often difficult to manage. “It actually makes it more difficult to make decisions and many do less because they’re controlled by it all and feel they can never escape the office,” said Dr Christine Grant.

“We’re all sad, and we’re a little worried…We’re sad about something missing in childhood,” psychologist Michael Thompson told 900 early childhood educators from 22 states packed into a lecture hall last week. “We have to fight back,” he declared. “We’re going to fight for play.”

It is estimated that since the 1980s the average American children have 8 to 12 fewer hours of free play time per week. Some of the factors behind the decline have been there for decades, others are more recent. Among the key factors are:

● Parents are unwilling to let their kids play outside on their own, for fear of injury or other accidents, and organized sports and other structured activities take up a large part of a child’s non-school hours.

● More hours per week are spent by kids watching TV, playing video games, using the Internet, and communicating on cell phones.

● More importance is attached to formal learning in preschool, more homework for primary school students and more pressure from parents on young children to quickly acquire academic skills.

“Parents are more self-conscious and competitive than in the past,” Thompson said. “They’re pushing their kids to do better than others…Free play loses out. ” But he points out that this option doesn’t necessarily breed (培养) creativity and can lead to burnout for good young athletes and frustration for the less skilled. He is also concerned that preschools, in the drive to prepare students for the academic challenges ahead, are reducing the opportunity for group fantasy play — and thus reducing children’s chances to learn on their own about fairness, kindness and other social interactions (交往).

The consequences are potentially awful, according to Thompson, who points out that reduced time to play freely with other children is producing a generation of unsociable young people and is a factor behind high rates of weight problems, anxiety, and depression among youth. “Without enough opportunity for forms of play that promote creative thinking,” he says, “America’s children will be at a disadvantage in the global economy.”