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

“Toxic” is a particularly strong word, why do you feel this way?

Curious as I’m coming from a perspective of a proponent of open-source software, even contributed to some projects including code and donations, I’ve run Linux on my computer for 18+ years, exclusively for about 12, I’ve been a Wikipedia editor (and voracious reader) for years, and I’ve used numerous open-source textbooks. To me, copyleft licensing is absolutely lovely and I’ve seen a long list of compelling benefits from it, not to mention I’ve seen numerous ways it can be used (profitably) in a business setting, although even I will admit that it’s not ideally suited to all uses or purposes, and I don’t always release all my works under it.

I think my biggest reason for loving copyleft is that it’s saved me and others a ton of money, while still allowing for people to generate reasonable amounts of profit and income. So for example, I have saved money on software, and I’ve seen non-profit and government agencies saving a ton of money as a result (in the case of govt, taxpayer money is saved) and I’ve also seen students save money on textbooks by using free / open source textbooks. It also ends up contributing to a body of works that can be used by people, businesses, and organizations with few or strained financial resources, something that I think is a worthy goal in and of itself.

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I think that it is not a great idea to assume that people who sign on to a learning platform, which is what iNat is, are OK with their images being used for any but a very narrow set of purposes.

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While I’m perfectly happy for people to freely use my data and images for personal or educational purposes, if somebody wants to use my images to make a profit (e.g. by selling a field guide), then I think I should be compensated for that use. I suspect many others feel the same way.

My iNat photos come mostly from quick phone pics and aren’t necessarily that high quality (so I doubt that anyone would particularly want to use them anyway), but for for somebody who has spent money and time on their photography, I wouldn’t be surprised if they feel a real ownership over their work and don’t want to release their photos for entirely free use.

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Agreed, same here. I’ve had individuals contact me for use of my images on Flickr. If it’s for non-commercial, pro-conservation purposes I say fine. If it’s for a commercial purpose (a field guide that will be sold) and they don’t offer compensation, then we need to have a discussion and often I’ll say no.

I don’t think iNaturalist should be a place for others to harvest photos for any purpose, although they are always free to contact the submitter of the photo record directly to make a request.

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This argument doesn’t make sense to me. If this were the concern, why is the default license CC-BY-NC, and not for users to retain copyright? CC-BY-NC still allows a wide range of purposes, including (at least in the U.S.) use by for-profit businesses so long as they are not used for a for-profit purpose.

I think the case for the default being for users to retain copyright is actually much stronger than the case for CC-BY-NC or any other NC license. In fact I would prefer retaining of copyright to be the default because I think this would encourage the problematic NC licenses less, and I think it would make a more compelling case for people to think about which license to use (with the hope that most users who want openness would choose less restrictive licenses.) It would also have an even stronger effect of preventing unintended use of photos or other info.

My concern with the current default is that a lot of users probably see it and think: “This is great, this is going to make my work useful for education and science.” without them being aware of the problems I mentioned above. Like, I seriously doubt that the average casual user would realize that this license precludes use on Wikipedia, let alone any of the weird international legal problems or fear of gray area that could lead people to avoid use (such as in educational materials) even where it would be legal or at least intended to be legal under CC’s explanation of the license.

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It seems like a lot of this could also be addressed by a campaign asking/informing users about the benefits to choosing a CC0 or CC-BY license

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Yes! Regardless of what the default license is, more education / information about the licenses and their implications would be really important, and something I’d enthusiastically support!

I feel more strongly about this than about what the default license is.

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Yes, but none of that’s really an argument for loosening the license further. I can come up with arguments for the current arrangement but the reality is that there is no setting for licensing that would resolve every legitimate concern.

Copyright is a topic with a lot of grey areas, a lot of variability among jurisdictions and no simple solutions for balancing desires for access and control. The current arrangement suits me, although I can imagine circumstances in which it wouldn’t, and I’m fine with leaving it up to users whether they want to loosen or tighten their settings. I’m also fine with making the default retention of copyright by users, if that’s what iNat wants to do. I agree with the point made by @alexis18. As well, a checkbox in settings or in each observation offering the option of setting permissions to allow use in Wikipedia would be a way of addressing that concern directly.

Most people have no idea what the licensing involves. They’re here to learn and one of the things iNat might want to teach is the meaning of the Creative Commons and its relevance to iNat. Maybe placing the options more visibly in the observation process, with appropriate links to clear FAQ content, would increase the number of observations available to Wikipedia. Regardless, informed consent matters.

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See related feature request, and as an example, the infographic linked here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/improve-viewing-editing-copyright-information-on-observations/308/22?u=bouteloua

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Perhaps “toxic” is a strong word. “Infectious” might be more accurate?

Open Source is great. GPL and copyleft? Not so much, in my opinion.

The problem is as soon as you use copyleft, you are forced to use that license for anything that uses it. It infects everything it touches. I too am in the software industry, and I literally cannot use copyleft software at work as part of a solution. For example, a GPL or LGPL license is an automatic: No. We can usually find something that solves the same problem with an Apache 2 license (I am unaware of anything where there was not a commercial-friendly option).

I do not like forcing everyone for all eternity to use a particular license for their own work just because they used some of mine. I understand that you have a different opinion on that, and that is fine.

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Interesting discussion! I would like my observations and media to be shareable with both Wikipedia and GBIF, so I looked up their policies. Wikipedia accepts share-alike licenses (e.g. CC-BY-SA) but does not accept non-commercial licenses (e.g., CC-BY-NC), while GBIF accepts non-commercial licenses but does not accept share-alike licenses, so the most restrictive license that satisfies both is CC-BY. I’ve now changed all my content to that. I suspect the GBIF restrictions would be a deal-killer for iNaturalist to default to the CC-BY-SA license.

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One thing to keep in mind is that the licenses for images, sounds and observations can all be different (although I don’t feel that iNat does a particularly good job of explaining that). I’d even argue copyrighted observations shouldn’t be allowed (the factual info that “I saw organism X in place Y”), while for images and sound recordings allowing a lot more freedom makes sense to me. In any case, I would hope the license of the image or sound wouldn’t be a problem for GBIF to be sent the actual observation point if the license for that is compatible, which I expect is what they really need.

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Thanks for posting this. I’ve been wondering what license options I should select to make sure my data is at least available to Wikipedia. I’ve updated my settings now to CC-BY. It would be nice if there were some kind of explanation for each license setting, with the pros and cons laid out in layman’s terms, because I suspect those binomes are completely foreign to most casual users–they certainly are to me.

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I think it comes down to trusting what it is that will be shared. If I contribute an image and someone wants to modify that image and even if they attribute it correctly, I would like to have some say in how much they can alter the image and thus retain the right to not allow them to use it if I disagree with the changes they have made. It’s going to be rare circumstances, and I struggle to think of an example that would be relatable, but lets say I am out observing nature, and I share a photo of a friend looking under logs for herps… and then someone else modifies that image and puts tractors and logging equipment in the background and a caption over it saying “locals are helping loggers to clear our forests”…

Also, we need to think about what we let out of the gate, because it is not easy to get them back in. It’s much easier to start from a restrictive license and later on offer it more freely, than it is to start with a very unrestrictive license and then to try and tighten control. So I think default should be NC inclusive, and more encouragement in the onboarding for participants to change to the less restrictive licenses

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To me, this is the key issue here. For most people, the observation license should be public domain if people want the data to be most useful for science. If a researcher is doing an analysis with thousands of observations and thousands of observers, it is not practical to give attribution to all of them. Except in very rare cases (e.g., an exceptionally interesting observation that the observer is planning to publish) I don’t understand the use case for more restrictive licenses for observations on a citizen science site.

The image/sound licensing is a separate issue, and I would guess that 99% of users don’t realise this is a different thing from the observation license (I remember it being a eureka moment when I realised the distinction). I use CC-BY for my images so others can use them while requiring attribution.

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I agree that one of the biggest improvements is making the difference between the observation info/data license and the media licenses clearer.

I agree with @deboas that making the data license default as public domain or as close to it as possible is ideal for usability. That’s kind of one of the points of the site. I also agree with @twainwright that the GBIF license requirement would be hard and fast for iNat. Defaulting to CC-BY-SA doesn’t seem doable, at least for the data.

My question with this, though, is do media licenses even matter for GBIF? Or is it only the data license? It seems to me like the licenses that matter for Wikipedia etc. are really just the media ones, and maybe only the data ones matter for GBIF?

I do worry that defaulting to a more open license for media might turn some users off. Though users that are really worried about use of their material off the bat may be more motivated to dig into the settings and set their licenses appropriately for their needs rather than just going with the defaults.

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I dislike, and disagree with the GBIF restrictions. One of the reasons I dislike their handling of things is that they convert CC-BY data to NC clauses, thus introducing all the problems and downsides associated with those licenses.

To me, this is a compelling reason not to use or even support GBIF. It says that its goal is to facilitate free and open access around scientific data, but their practice of introducing a problematic additional clause into material they’ve taken from other sources does not seem consistent with these goals.

This is a completely valid concern. But this has nothing to do with the NC clause. The NC does not protect you from this. In fact, none of the licenses being discussed here do.

If you want this, your only option is to retain copyright.

Haha…well…this might be handled through libel or slander laws, that’s a completely different question. And you would have this protection regardless of what license the photo was released under.

I totally agree here, because once you release a work under a more permissive license, you cannot retract it.

I personally am a fan of defaulting things to being strictly copyrighted. You can then recommend people to use other licenses. The thing that bothers me about this whole setup, I think the NC licenses are problematic and I don’t like the idea of any organization advocating for them. Having them be the default comes across as iNaturalist endorsing or advocating for this license. Allowing people to use them is one thing, but setting them as the default is not only something that I cannot support, it’s something that at least mildly sours me on the organization carrying them out.

But I could also respect defaulting it to CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or even public domain. I just can’t get comfortable with the current default because I see it as such a problematic license, it makes me cringe to see any large, influential organization advocating for or advancing its widespread use, which is what iNaturalist is doing here.

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I may have missed the specifics on this, but my understanding was that you can release data in GBIF with CC0, CC-BY, and CC-NC.

https://www.gbif.org/terms

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Recently, I saw a case where GBIF batch-imported a bunch of data from iNaturalist, and included CC0 and CC-BY data, along with CC-BY-NC, but then converted all of the licensing to CC-BY-NC. It was a “lazy” but legal way to combine the licenses, but it rubbed me the wrong way because it was a move towards the NC licensing, whereas I would rather be building a consensus, especially among the scientific world and the broader world of people working towards the common good, to be discouraging and/or moving away from these licenses.