From my understanding of copyright law, simple data is not copyrightable, you can read this explanation, so that aspect of an observation could be used freely.
The only issue in terms of copyrighting the observations is any copyrightable material (usually text) stored in the record. And even there, it is only protectable to the degree any text would be. So, for instance, you could paraphrase, summarize, or even quote small amounts of the text if needed. And in practice few records contain enough text that you couldn’t legally quote them.
So for practical purposes, it’s a moot point.
It’s really mostly an issue for the additional material, mainly images and sounds. So if GBIF is only using the data, they can use all material, including ones where the user has chosen to retain all copyright.
I see all the posters bringing up points that potential approach A or B or C to this issue will be confusing for many users, and I totally agree. The only point I want to add is: We’ve got a decent chunk of people on this thread who have thought a fair amount about this issue and there’s still some confusion.
Almost every solution or system dealing with CC licenses is going to be confusing to 99% of users no matter how well done it is. There are so many options, and close reading of details and time is necessary to understand. That’s why I think focusing on the default is the most important issue. It’s what almost all iNat users will stick with regardless.
For those who care enough to set a non-default choice, the current system, while clunky, works ok (but those users are few and already invested enough to figure it out). So to me the default is the real crux.
I agree. And I am very concerned about the potential for the NC license to be presented in a way that is misleading. The problems that I’ve brought up here with the NC license, which I believe to be serious, are ones that few people have shown awareness of.
Merely polling people about the licenses based on the current summaries written on the iNaturalist site, is thus likely to give a bias in favor of the NC license because the problems with it are not communicated by the description.
My apologies, for some reason I had it in my head that NC meant “No Change”! I might have been conflating it with ND (No Derivatives) although I admit I don’t fully understand that one either…
it seems like this is the key “problem” that would be “solved” by changing the default license in iNaturalist. but is it really a problem? why is it a good thing that every Wikipedia article must have an image? if a particular plant doesn’t have an image in the Wiki world, why does it matter, if a search via most major search engines will already point you to images in iNaturalist and other sites?
exposure alone doesn’t put food on the table. it’s one thing for a software developer or academic to make some of their work freely available. it’s another thing for an artist to make their work freely available. the next gig for the average artist is much less likely to bring a decent paycheck than the next gig for a software developer or academic.
Which is likely to cause less distress and anger among users. Finding out your content is freely available for anyone to take and use however they want, or finding out you have to click a toggle to release your content under an open license if that is your knowing preference?
Clearly the latter, please leave the default license as is. In fact it would be better if the default were all rights retained. Users should knowingly choose to license their property in an open manner, in particular given the ‘irrevocable’ claims applied to CC licenses.
Yes, it is a problem. There are a ton of articles on Wikipedia that lack images, or that have low-quality images, or that could have additional images (i.e. pictures of the flower, or the bark, or photos that illustrate habitat.)
I also make plant ID guides, for example, here is a guide for distinguishing Northern Red Oak vs Black Oak. I often have made these in response to seeing discussions on iNaturalist, and then I come back here to share them and people have appreciated them a lot.
But finding images for these guides is really tough. It’s usually the limiting factor in time/effort necessary to make the guides, and in some cases it limits whether or not I can make them at all. If it’s a species local to me, I can go out and take the photo myself, but that takes time, and I also have to wait for the right time of year. It’s much easier if I can just find open-licensed photos. And, I won’t touch works with the NC license because of the concerns I gave above. One of the main reasons is that I’m probably going to release most of these guides under a CC-BY-SA license, but the other concerns are also likely.
I could imagine it’s a real issue for people writing copyleft textbooks or field guides. I would find the iNaturalist images extremely useful if I were putting together such a work.
I completely agree. But I think this is pretty irrelevant to this discussion.
Every photographer who sells their work, who I’ve talked to, has been well-versed in issues of copyright and most of them choose to retain full copyright when they post a photo to a public website. This fits with what I have seen on iNaturalist too: there are some fantastic pictures with great composition, probably taken by professionals or very skilled amateurs with good equipment, which have the copyright retained.
The issue here is the default license. It’s a license that is highly problematic, but most people don’t realize how or why it’s problematic. So I could see a vast majority of users leaving it thinking “this sounds good” but not realizing the problems it causes for people who want to reuse the photos for uses they would support. This is why I think CC-BY-SA is better because I think it actually achieves the spirit of the license better. CC-BY-SA doesn’t prohibit commercial use but it does guarantee that the work remains freely available if reused or built upon.
The overwhelming majority of people who upload photos to iNaturalist aren’t ever going to make any money off them, and probably couldn’t if they tried.
But many of them just happen to take photos that are super useful for something like making an ID guide, or including in an article, or other educational material. I can’t count how many times I have found multiple photos I wanted to use with NC licensing, whereas I have struggled to find any photos with CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA licensing, or only found one or two that were lower-quality for whatever end I was using them for. I wouldn’t have come here to bring up this issue, if it weren’t a real issue!
that doesn’t mean the default license should be changed to something that entirely gives up people’s opportunity and rights to make money off of their work, if they choose to do so. NC by default is already a middle ground in this respect.
i’ve read through the arguments in this discussion (and others), and i’m still not convinced that NC as default is problematic from the perspective of being too restrictive.
earlier, i asked why Wikipedia needs to have a bunch of images, considering that search engines can already direct people to tons of images in iNaturalist and elsewhere, and you just reasserted that there are a bunch of Wikipedia articles that lack quality images (which is not really an answer to my question). again, why is it important that those images are available in Wikipedia, if someone who wants to see images can easily find images elsewhere? (in some ways, if i’m forced to go to iNaturalist to find images, isn’t that better, since i can find a ton more images, images in geographic context, etc.?)
your example of making ID guides doesn’t really convince me that NC by default is a problem either. as others have noted, if you need just a few photos, it’s not that difficult to ask for permission to use photos. i’ve had folks ask for permission to use my photos, and it’s never a long process from ask to approval / denial. obviously, not everyone will respond quickly, but that’s just the nature of asking for permission, right? the fact that when you make ID guides that you don’t want to ask for permission doesn’t really make me want to give up my rights any more readily.
You’ll probably hate me for this but all of my images are deliberately set to all rights reserved. I posted them here for use by iNaturalist not so they can be freely used anywhere. If you want to use my images you still can but you will have to negotiate your own license. If it is for a charitable cause and I am on board it need not even have a cost associated with it. The other option is right click in chrome and google image search it. You will find most of my images available to license for commercial use at a variety of stock agencies. You know what helps a photographer better than a commercial use with a by line? A commercial license with cash attached to it
That’s a legitimate perspective, but there’s already an option to have anything you submit to iNat be all rights reserved, and I cannot imagine that option will ever go away. The only thing you “lose” is the metadata which can be used freely. This is about the default license. It’s been said, but any professional photographer would check the licensing before uploading anything.
I think it could really offend a few users if they learn, after the fact, that someone “stole” one of their photos for a book, web site, etc., and they can’t do anything about it. A few outraged people might outweigh the advantages of defaulting to allow commercial use.
Rather than defaulting to NC, it might be enough to add a note saying if you want your photos available for Wikipedia (and/or whatever else), you’ll need to pick a license without NC. (Maybe it already does – I haven’t seen it for a few years)
Prologue: I’m tepid at best about fiddling with licensing. Observations have a certain autonomy–a capacity to stand of themselves–that isn’t present in the typical code patch or Wikipedia paragraph, and people seem to feel a stronger sense of proprietorship in them accordingly. It only takes a few people irrevocably licensing away some of their content without realizing it and then getting Extremely Mad to create a serious controversy.
That said, I’m completely baffled by the philosophical point you’re pushing. When writing educational and instructional content, it’s about as normal and rational as possible to want both an abundance of illustrations (within the limits of the medium) juxtaposed with the text to reinforce verbal explanation with visuals, and to exercise some authorial discretion over which exact illustration, of all those available, best reinforces your text at that point. When my bio text reaches the chapter on plant diversity…it inserts a figure with a phylogenetic tree of major plant groups. It does not send people to muck about on Google Scholar, where they can find equivalent figures with more detail and a whole bunch of research attached, which according to your line of reasoning is obviously superior. I mean, if you think Wikipedians are mooching hippies or something for wanting your images, go off…but this “no, no, you wouldn’t be able to make use of my images if I did give them to you!” line of argument is puzzling to me.
I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what I’m trying to do and the amount of time and work involved.
I have over 1,000 ecoregion articles that need images. I have over 25,000 stub articles on plants, around 6,000 of which I’ve marked as higher priority. Even limiting myself to the few hundred woody plants that are referenced in things like the FEIS and Silvics manual, that’s a tremendous amount of pages and images. And then you figure, for the ID / comparison guides, you are combining all sorts of possible combinations, so if you have 100 plants you might end up with 200 or more guides. A finished guide has a minimum of 8 images, but some have 12 or more.
It’s an ongoing project that will probably never be finished. I am trying to complete as much of at as possible, as efficiently as possible.
And asking for permission throws a huge wrench in the efficiency. It is a limiting factor in the time I put in, when I use images that need permission, and I can explain why:
When I reach out to a user to ask permission, first of all, I don’t know who is going to write back, or when they are going to write back. A good portion of users (especially on sites like Flickr, but sometimes iNaturalist) are no longer active, and never reply. Some reply, but only weeks later. Most people who do reply are eager to grant permission, but some don’t.
So I’d say, on average, I have a relatively low rate of acceptance (<50%) on photos, not because people say no (this happens, but rarely), but mainly because people don’t get back to me.
But more importantly, the process is time-consuming and it also taxes me in terms of decision fatigue.
If I look through a list of acceptably-licensed images, I can pick one without involving anyone else in the process. And I can proceed with whatever I’m doing. If I have to wait on someone, it interrupts the process. It may be interrupted for hours, or days, while I place it on the back burner waiting for responses.
It also throws a wrench in other things. When I pick images for an ID guide, which image I pick for a particular box affects my choices of ID’s for the other boxes. Part of this is that I want to show more than just the “core characteristic” each box illustrates…although that’s the main point, I am also trying to show the range of natural variability so that the user “passively” picks up other useful ID tips just by glancing over the total collection of images.
So if I am waiting on a choice between 2 or 3 images, and then I later find out that I have permission to post one, but not another, this might change my choices for other images.
If the permission comes in weeks later, I might have already chosen another image. I might have already sent a thank-you note to another photographer and showed them how I featured their work, and I don’t want to immediately take it down and replace it with something else just because I thought it was better.
All of this requires a lot of decisions and judgment calls, decisions that would not be necessary if the repository of open-licensed images were adequate to begin with. The act of looking through images to choose an approrpiate one, crop it, etc. is tricky to begin with, and the asking of permission interrupts and complicates this process in a way that ends up being the limiting factor if I have to do it.
And of course, through all of this, I’m barely getting paid anything at all. This is a side-project and the amount of donations I’ve received to fund it, at least presently, are nowhere near what would be necessary to pay me even minimum wage, even before taxes, for the amount of hours I put in.
At the risk of being blunt, too damn bad, that’s a choice you have made. Suggesting users should surrender their licensing rights to make a job you have chosen to do is not the right answer.
I have no issue with the use of open CC licenses nor people who use or advocate for them. However, their use should be a knowing choice people make. Burying it in 15 pages of legalese and indemnifications or pre-selected for you as one of 25 account configuration settings is not a knowing choice.
I keep hearing people bringing up this point, but to me, it seems theoretical, and even if it’s true that some people might get upset by this, I’m not convinced I agree with the conclusions that this harm would outweigh the benefits.
The reason I see this as theoretical is that, in my experience (and this discussion is reinforcing it, not challenging it) I have found that the people who care most about their work being reused are already aware of copyright issues, and select less permissive licensing of their own initiative.
I have never, not once, not even online, encountered a person who was angry at a website because they uploaded an image and it was released with a copyleft license and they were angry that it was used commercially. And this is true even about sites that are much less clear about licensing. iNaturalist is super clear about explaining licensing (although I have some quibbles that I think its presentation of the NC license is misleading) and I think it is much less likely to offend users as a result. Compare with a site like Facebook, where users “agree” to terms of use and buried in pages of legalese is an agreement to let them use your photos royalty free with all sorts of crazy terms like the license being “transferrable”, “sub-licensable”. And yet millions of people still use Facebook and still upload photos to them.
All this said, even if someone did get upset about this, is it really worth shaping policy on the basis of it? I’ve learned that it’s dangerous to go through life driving your decisions by fear of other people getting upset. Our responsibility is not to cater to other people’s feelings, rather it’s to treat them fairly and to communicate respectfully. I think iNaturalist’s responsibility here is to communicate the licenses clearly to users and to get their informed consent. Maybe we could improve on this. But there’s a point at which if someone doesn’t read the boxes and just selects something and then later gets mad, it’s their problem, their responsibility, and no one else’s.
Plus, people already are upset at iNaturalist.
For example, I’m upset about a lot of things about iNaturalist, big and small. I’m upset about the fact that it asks me repeatedly for money, and yet 15% of the donations get taken by the parent non-profit organization, whose director is paid a six-figure salary that I consider unacceptably high for a charitable cause, and furthermore, that I had to ask a lot of questions to find this info because it wasn’t presented to me transparently in a place linked to when the site asked me for donations. This offends me, makes me angry. It makes me feel conflicted because I’m now torn between supporting it financially, something I’d want to do, and the thought that my money would be spent in a way that is in conflict with my values.
And yet I still like iNaturalist; I still use it, I still advocate for it, I still link to it from my websites, I still actively participate in the community, pouring hours into “dirty work” like going through pages of unidentified plants, pouring hours into conversations to try to help people learn more about ID while learning more myself, and I still feel really positively about it overall.
So I just don’t think this would be the doomsday scenario that some of the comments here seem to be suggesting it would be.
i’m not sure why you’re reading this in my comments. i have no problem with Wikipedia or Wikipedians generally. i understand the desire for a writer of a Wikipedia article to want more media options. obviously, if i’m making anything, the better the ingredients available to me, the better my chances of making a good final product. but presumably, you’re writing for someone, not just yourself or for the sake of the making a product.
as a reader of Wikipedia articles, i’ve never thought to myself, “man, i wish that article had a photo”, or “gee, that article was crap because it didn’t have an image”. if an article has no images or just a few images, i just take the article for what it is, and if i still would like to see an image or more images, i can check out the references in the article and conduct my own search for additional information. i don’t expect Wikipedia to be some sort of magical source of all knowledge.
so from the perspective of a Wikipedia reader, i generally don’t see problems with Wikipedia articles not having images. (more) images might be a nice-to-have, but the lack of images generally doesn’t rise to the level of something that i would describe as a problem – at least not in my opinion.
so whereas you hesitance to fiddle with default licensing is based on the potential harm / cost of the “solution”, my hesitance to fiddle with it is based on lack of benefit.
(i’m not sure exactly how to address the rest of your second paragraph because i’m not sure i totally understand it in the context of this discussion.)
the way i’m reading this, the main problem you’re describing is a lack of time. i don’t doubt that what you’re doing takes a lot of time, and that having to deal with licensing is a challenge. but i just don’t see that challenge as a problem for which changing the default licensing in iNaturalist is an appropriate solution. in my mind, more appropriate solutions are to get funding to hire additional people to help you on your project, to find people willing to help for free, or to scale down on what you’re trying to do.
This seems like it’s changing the topic. You had said that you weren’t convinced that NC poses a problem, because it’s not difficult to ask for permission to use photos.
I replied by explaining that, in my workflow, asking for permission is a limiting factor in my ability to get work done, i.e. I get much less done if I have to do it. Abundant funding and hiring additional people wouldn’t change that. It would just shift the problem away from “I am getting less done in this mostly unpaid side project.” to “The funding for this project is being utilized less efficiently.” i.e. getting less bang for your buck.
Either way, the fact that an overwhelming majority of iNaturalist photos are currently released only under NC licensing leads less of the sort of work I’m doing to get done.
You may still not agree fully with all my points, and I can respect that, but I want you to at least acknowledge that the NC licensing does make a difference in hindering the creation of educational materials and other works that serve the public.