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

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.

This particular issue has been discussed on the forum here (apologies if you’ve already seen this)

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-data-on-gbif-shows-only-cc-by-nc-excluding-cc0-and-cc-by/9952/11?u=alexis18

And on the GBIF side of things:
https://github.com/gbif/portal-feedback/issues/2423

And from what I understand, this is because historically GBIF required datasets to set a single CC license for a dataset, and since iNat has mixed licenses the way to go is the highest CC level.

But now, since the change discussed on the github issue, the individual records retain their CC licenses as written (see here for example):
https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/search?dataset_key=50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7&taxon_key=2007764
In this search only including iNat data, there still are ~400 CC0 and ~500 CC-BY records.

The datasets were all reinterpreted at the change, so this should have been fixed retroactively.

Others might have more details on this, so please correct me if I’m off base.

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Ahh, that’s great news that that has been fixed, and it makes me feel better about the situation! Thanks for drawing my attention to that!

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Yes! I think this is a more accurate description. And this is exactly the intent of the licenses…i.e. they’re intended to maximize the freeness or openness of the material. I.e. not only do they ensure that the work remains freely available, but anything derived from it must also remain free in such a way.

And it makes sense that not everyone would want this. Anyone in the business of proprietary software would find copyleft licensing incompatible with their business model.

How does this apply to iNaturalist though?

The way NC licenses are presented, which I would argue is misleading (see this thread and this proposed diagram), is that they allow all use except for “commercial” use. As I have argued in this point though, this is not true…they exclude all sort of other types of use, including use in copyleft works, use by any organization, i.e. anyone other than individuals in Germany (and potentially more countries.) And then there is the additional issue of people erring on the side of caution because of the vagueness or ill-defined boundary of what exactly constitutes “commercial”, which discourages all sorts of use that is relatively certainly non-commercial, but the lack of 100% certainty precludes use by people who don’t want to deal with the possibility of problems down the line.

I think SA licenses actually do a better job of discouraging “commercial” use. You yourself gave a testimony of how and why you avoid them in your work, and this is going to apply to all but a few types of business models. A software developer can make money from copyleft software by providing support or implementing custom solutions on-demand, but they can’t successfully sell the software itself because it’s available for free (except if they sell it really cheaply and provide a convenient package, as back in the early 2000’s when some companies were selling linux installation CD’s in neatly packaged boxes and making some money off them.) And anyone could sell prints of a copyleft photo, but if it was much more expensive than the cost of printing and any added value of convenience, no one would buy it because it was also available for free.

So the SA licenses effectively limit commercial use. But they do so without any of the problems I have discussed above. There is no vagueness of what constitutes “commercial” use.

This is why I would prefer CC-BY-SA to be the default option. I would argue that it does what a lot of people think the NC clause does, but it avoids all of the problems that the NC clause brings, that people didn’t necessarily anticipate. The NC clause and licenses, I think are misleading, and I would prefer if they were not used anywhere.

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When we just think about requiring a few images for one specific use, asking the observer for permission works fine. But that’s simply not going to work for a use such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Commons allows only freely shareable images to be uploaded, which typically means CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Wikipedia primarily follows that same policy with some very narrow exceptions for limited use of non-free media when a free equivalent is unavailable and could not reasonable be created.

If an image is released under a non-free license such as CC-BY-NC, then for a start it’s unlikely to be something that a Wikipedia editor would come across. That’s because the various image import and sharing tools available to assist collaborative content creation have built-in filters to ensure only free content is presented.

Even if the Wikipedia editor was aware of some CC-BY-NC image from iNat and wanted to use it, it’s not just as simple as just asking. For a start, there’s no particular reason to think that a Wikipedia editor will already have an iNat account, so they would likely need to create one in order to communicate with the iNat observer. Of course, iNat has policies in place to prevent spam, and so the Wikipedia editor will now have to add at least 3 observations or 3 IDs before they can use the Message functionality to try to contact the observer. And, as we all know, there are many, many inactive iNat users, so there’s a fair chance the Wikipedia editor will never hear back.

Let’s say that the Wikipedia editor gets through all that, and contacts the observer, who has no objection to the image being used in Wikipedia. That’s still not enough. The observer actually needs to relicense the image under a license such as CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA before the editor can incorporate it within any article. If the iNat observer has a photo of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, I can see all of that being worth the effort. But that’s simply not a scalable approach to address the vast numbers of Wikipedia articles where editors have asked for pictures of organisms to be added. This includes:

Now, it’s absolutely the observer’s right to determine whether and how they want to license the images they created. If I made my living as a photographer, I would likely want to retain full copyright for all images. But the issue here is the default license that should be set for a new account if the user doesn’t make any changes.

My feeling is that default setting should be the most permissive alternative that would still be generally accepted by most regular iNat users. I’ve seen the comments above that allowing commercial use might “sour” some users whose images later appear in a for-profit context. That’s a possible scenario, but it doesn’t seem that it would be a frequent concern. (People have uploaded 66 million files to Wikimedia Commons and I’m not aware of a flood of complaints stemming from commercial use of these free images.)

Here’s the thing: You (and every other iNat user) can still apply whatever license you like to the images you upload. This proposal is just about the default license that is used for a new user if they decide not to make some other selection. iNat already makes the assumption that users might be willing to share their images, by defaulting to the CC-BY-NC license. @cazort’s proposal is simply to use a slightly different Creative Commons license as the default because that would have a big impact on the reusability of images uploaded by these users.

Any arguments along the lines of “here’s how I feel about my iNat images” are moot. What we need to consider is how an average person new to iNat would generally feel about use of their images assuming they don’t actively select a specific license. As a thought experiment, let’s imagine we take 100 people who recently joined iNat and give them a crash course in image copyright and licensing, with details of the pros and cons for each of the CC licenses. After that, we ask these now well-informed iNat users how they would feel about their images being available under each of the main license candidates (say CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC and “all rights reserved”). There will be some people strongly opposed to each, and many people open to several options.

If we had the results of that thought experiment (which isn’t going to happen), iNat staff could then select as the default license the least restrictive option that has broad support and a fairly low level of opposition. It wouldn’t be necessary to choose the option with the absolute lowest level of opposition, because every user can change their preferred license, but we still want to avoid the default license being an unpleasant surprise for a significant number of users.

I would contend that Wikimedia Commons has shown that using a free-license default is not a problem for many amateur photographers, and switching the iNat default to a free license would be more than justified by the benefits that would come from greatly increasing the availability of (fairly) reliably identified pictures of a wide range of organisms. My view is that the percentage of iNat users who didn’t actively select a license and yet would be fine with CC-BY-NC but unhappy with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA is very small, and is nowhere near high enough to outweigh the benefit here.

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Excellent explanation and clarification, thank you.

I don’t see why it would not be possible to try. Perhaps two such crash-course-polls, one targeted at a random selection of users who have been on iNat for under a month, and one targeted at a randomized selection of users present for over a month who have at least, say, 200 observations.
Of course the most common response would be [closed the prompt, no answer], which is also kind of an answer: I dont care.

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I think the challenge would be to ensure users understand enough about the implications of each license for their poll choices to be an accurate reflection of their real preferences. As a California resident, I’m very aware that putting complex matters up for popular vote is not sufficient to deliver an informed decision.

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An important point. What I envision would be a mandatory bit of reading or video with controlled speed so people cant just skip them. Up to 90-120 seconds because people can be incredibly lazy. Then a poll. I have no idea whether such a thing would really provide useful data. but I feel as though it would take less time to create a video+poll than it would take to research the most effective means of getting a representative response… and again, if someone is not willing to take literally two minutes to get a rudimentary lesson on the consequences of licensing, they probably dont care very much.

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If iNat staff wanted to research preferences for a default license, I do think @astra_the_dragon’s idea of a concise video explainer would be the best way to try to ensure people give informed poll responses. I’m not sure whether we’d get more useful results by asking for responses on a Strongly Favor – Strongly Oppose scale for each default license candidate (presented in random order), or whether some type of ranked-choice selection would be more useful.

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I have the opposite opinion. I understand there are many social benefits when individuals release their data and photos under permissive licenses: based on this conversation, I have changed my observation license to CC0, and I am considering doing the same with my sounds and photos. But from an institutional perspective, I do not think iNat should default to waiving people’s authorial rights on their behalf, without making it abundantly clear that that’s what is happening (I’m sure it’s in the EULA or something, but it’s widely acknowledged that those are rarely read). If there is a default, I think it should be all rights reserved.

If I could design the licensing system in iNat, I would have a dialogue pop up when somebody uploads their first observation asking something like the following:

How would you like to license this observation?

  • Public Domain: Anyone can use my photos, sounds, and data for any purpose
  • Creative Commons Attribution: Anyone can use my my photos, sounds, and data for any purpose, as long as they credit me
  • Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial: Anyone can use my my photos, sounds, and data for noncommercial purposes, as long as they credit me
  • Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike: Anyone can use my my photos, sounds, and data for any purpose, as long as they credit me and release their work under a similar licence
  • […]
  • All Rights Reserved: I keep full ownership over my photos, sounds, and data

:ballot_box_with_check: Make this my default license and don’t ask me again (you can change your default license at any time in your account settings)

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Given:

  • Most people are generally uninformed on what the various licenses actually mean
  • The average person probably assumes (rightly or wrongly) that the license of things they upload online is closer to something like copyright retained
  • Most people never look at or change default settings (the same way people don’t read terms of services).

I think changing the default license to one that is wildly more permissive than what the average user would expect is a bad idea.

If the goal is to get more photos on a more permissive license, that should be achieved through education (For example a prompt at sign up, or on the homepage for established users, that briefly explains the pros (if you use this license your work can be added to wikipedia!) and cons (but it could also be used in a commercial context with attribution).)

The alternative just feels like taking advantage of people for their lack of knowledge on the fine points of IP law. Edit: Maybe not taking advantage of people directly, but allowing people to be taken advantage of.

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I hear your argument as well.
I agree that it’s super uncool when companies such as Facebook take your uploaded images and data, and use them in ways you wouldn’t want. But Facebook does it for money, in a predatory way, deliberately buries liability in pages upon pages of legalese, and then additionally breaks those terms and the law any way.
I think it’s good for a non-for-profit citizen science platform to make your uploads publicly available by default so long as they are forthright about it. It’s for the public good, not for money.

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No one is arguing iNaturalist would be using the photos for money. The issue is that certain licenses would allow any rando to come along and use the photos in a commercial context and that’s not the general expectation a person has when they upload something to the internet, and “oh that’s what you agreed to by not reading carefully when you set up your account” wouldn’t be much comfort to someone who ended up in that scenario.

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I wonder whether an acceptable compromise would be as follows – default stays as-is, but when a user hits 50 or 100 observations, a prompt comes up asking them to consider a different license, explaining each one. That way users who are unlikely to come back won’t get annoyed, but users who stick around would be encouraged to use open licenses.
Also, I don’t know how many good-quality images are uploaded by small-volume casual users, proportionately to large-volume longtime users. Asking established users to use more permissive licenses may actually be more effective than changing the default for new users.

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I agree with what you’re saying, but I’ll just point out that the suggested popup runs into the problem @bouteloua raised in their linked request, i.e., that the way iNat implements licensing means the decision you make for an observation is separate and distinct from decision that applies to the photos in your observation. I think there are several problems with that policy, but I don’t make the rules.

As for the broader issue, I’ll just say it’s important to remember that iNat is not really a democracy, and that ardent Linux / copyleft evangelists are a minority of the internet.

I agree it’s confusing, but I don’t think my suggestion is necessarily a problem. Rather than overload a new user with choosing 3 separate licenses at their first observation, my proposed pop-up would initially apply the same setting to all three licenses (as the default CC-BY-NC does currently). Some text at the bottom of the pop-up could explain that users can subsequently fine-tune their preferences if they want to, and link to the relevant settings page.

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