A Case for Changing the Default License (to not include a NC clause)

[deboas]

Just cross-linking to a discussion raising another problem with the use of CC-BY-NC as default observation license - it can apparently make it more difficult for records to be used to inform environmental impact assessments:

@deedb8

You must also be careful as by default iNaturalist observations are licenced as CC-BY-NC (and very few people check or change it) this applies to the end use so prevents a developer or any commercial user cannot make use of the observation (nor can those observations be shared to a commercial user e.g. we could not report a rare species to a developer if the observation was from iNaturalist. Similarly a planning authority could not use an observation in that way).