small reminder to be civil and to delay posting if you’re getting upset
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When I signed up for iNaturalist I found the licensing to be exceptionally transparent, more so than on any other site I had joined in the past several years. It’s certainly not buried in 15 pages of legalese.
Furthermore the licensing is repeatedly presented to users when they look at other photos, so there is a constant reminder of it.
And it’s fairly prominent in the account settings.
I’m not going to say you don’t have a point, I agree stongly that their use should be a knowing choice people make, but I think you’re at best exaggerating when you make it out like it’s hidden in the terms of use the way some of the less-favorable stipulations of licensing are on, say, sites like Facebook.
I brought this issue up because I strongly suspect that a lot of people are sticking with the NC licensing not because it’s “buried in pages of legalese” but because they looked at it briefly and it sounded good to them.
I also think that a CC-BY-SA or perhaps even a CC-BY license might also sound good to most people too. Who knows? I wouldn’t have brought this topic up if I didn’t think it was likely.
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NC by default doesn’t advance your goals, but i wouldn’t describe it has hindering your goals either. the fact that i’m not a billionaire certainly doesn’t help me achieve my goals, but it’s not hindering my path in life either. that i don’t have my celebrity crush’s number on speed dial doesn’t help me achieve my goals, but it’s not hindering my path to love either…
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Then1 of 2 things is true. Either:
- with your level of focus on licensing issues, yours represents an atypical experience with the site
- or if you believe your experience to be representative of a typical iNat user, they have done the same review of the licensing terms and chosen not to change their license settings to a more open one.
Neither is compelling evidence the site should change its defaults.
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Here’s what I saw when opening the signup form just now:
Now, if I were to object to anything in this process, it is NOT that the users are not being informed that their works will be available to others. I don’t really see how iNat could be much clearer on this point, perhaps beyond making users actively check that box instead of having it be selected by default (I’d argue this would be a good idea.)
My main issue here is that their presentation of the NC license is misleading. It reads:
“This means anyone can copy and reuse your photos and/or observations without asking your permission as long as they give you credit and don’t use the works commercially.”
It also says: “…this is the best license for sharing with researchers.”
I am arguing, in this post, that these claims are misleading. I have provided a compelling case that it is not the best license for sharing with researchers, as well as that, in practice, it discourages a lot of non-commercial use, so both aspects of the text are misleading.
I do have another issue here, but it’s something that could be fixed independently of this whole discussion, and I think it would address a major objection that several people have voiced (and that I share.) The text “You can…remove the license later.” is also misleading, because you cannot legally retract a license that has been granted. So, for instance, if someone has already reused a work, you cannot legally require them to take it down if you later change the license to something more restrictive. So this aspect of the wording is also misleading.
Basically, I see the status quo as (1) misleading people about the effect of the NC license (2) making people do a lot of extra work if they want to select anything other than NC (checking yes) or retaining copyright (unchecking the box.) So not only is iNat making NC the default, it’s strongly discouraging any other open licenses. This is why I object so strongly to the status quo.
I strongly suspect that if users were given, instead, a three-way or more choice, that more people would select more permissive licenses on signup. I also strongly suspect that if the wording were no so strongly loaded in favor of the NC license, that fewer people would select it.
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Interesting! I signed up to iNat through the Android app and I don’t remember an option like this (although it was two years ago, so I may have just forgotten). If it’s not there, it should be. Like you say, I think it would be better if this setting were opt-in (initially unchecked, retaining full copyright), but I bet a bunch of people would still chose to CC-license their observations.
I agree that that’s misleading. There is no reason I can think of that a NC license would be better for researchers than a CC-BY, and there are cases (like yours) where the more restrictive license hinders productive uses of people’s data. Provided this is a clear choice to all users when they sign up (whether in the browser or the app), I think you make a reasonable case to change the suggested license to CC-BY instead of CC-BY-NC. Consider my opinion changed! :)
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Just because you haven’t been prompted to have that explicit thought doesn’t mean that pictures are worthless. A page on a genus of plants that is just a brief description of the genus and a list of the included species is going to be infinitely more interesting with a photo or two than a text-only page.
There’s a reason journal articles and textbooks include many images that aren’t strictly necessary for conveying the information of the text. Humans are visual creatures, images stoke curiosity, break up text, and just generally make reading a more enjoyable and enriching experience.
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i’m not sure why some folks read such negative thoughts (“worthless”) into the things i write. here’s what i actually wrote:
similarly, to read iNaturalist’s prompts about licensing as misleading (see a few posts above) is a bit of a stretch, i think. i see nothing wrong with the “Yes license my photos…” prompt. the Learn More text could probably be cleaned up simply by fixing the “given” typo and adding “while retaining commercial rights to your work” at the end.
a lot of the arguments here, in my opinion, try way too hard to bend things to restrictions that Wikipedia has adopted for itself. just because Wikipedia has certain policies doesn’t mean that everyone else should adopt those policies or else somehow be considered to hinder work that educates and serves the public. that any of the photos in iNaturalist are licensed in a way that is compatible with Wikipedia is a net positive for Wikipedia, not a negative.
if you and i are headed to the same place, and i want to go there by taking a different path or by different means, it doesn’t mean that i’m not your friend. maybe it just means that we’re starting off at different places or that we have different things that we need to consider.
i think we could all have had a much better conversation about licensing here if, rather than just attacking NC right off the bat, this discussion started by also asking exactly what the advantages of NC are and why iNaturalist chose it as their default license choice.
and with that, i think i’m going to leave this thread… see you all elsewhere in the forum!
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I think I was pretty clear that I also feel the default license should be something that would not shock most average iNat users. I did take issue with a few assumptions being made in these comments:
- Just because user X doesn’t want to use CC-BY-SA (for example) to license their images, that’s some kind of argument against using that as the default image license. (Really, that just explains why users need to be able to make this choice themselves.)
- Just because we can imagine an iNat user (e.g. a professional photographer) who would be badly served by some license (e.g CC-BY-SA), that’s some kind of argument against using that as the default image license.
- That if there are several licenses that all succeed in being “not too shocking”, iNat should necessarily default to the least permissive.
iNat definitely should make really clear what the license options are and the implications of each. I think the current explanations are actually pretty good, although perhaps some more info on the consequences would be helpful (e.g. choose CC-BY-NC and your images won’t be available to projects like Wikipedia).
But we also need to acknowledge that lots of users will just accept the defaults, and it’s worth discussing whether there’s a strong case to change the default image license.
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Not at all. Clearly you’re a professional or semi-professional photographer, and it’s very important that iNat gives you (and anyone else who wants to keep full ownership of their images) the ability to easily keep copyright on your images. iNat wants people to use the site, irrespective of whether they’re willing to share rights to their images or other data.
The issue of the appropriate default license for new iNat users is a different one, however.
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No, not at all! If you regularly license out your photos, a rights release from you is a much bigger sacrifice than someone signing over their blurry cellphone snaps.
I think one of the premises participants may be reading into this thread, and the appeal that started it, is something like “I am engaged in major acts of altruism, perhaps pathologically so, and call upon you to reciprocate.” As someone with a fair bit of participation in different forms of “open culture”, I think that actually misses the mark. When I’m writing Wikipedia articles or logging observations and making IDs on iNaturalist, I’m mostly having fun and “scratching my own itch”. The reason these projects work isn’t that they stimulate massive, self-sacrificial altruism; it’s that they’re good at capturing and using the byproducts of people’s intellectual work.
The availability of Wikipedia means that if I feel like learning about false cloak ferns, I have some modest incentives to do it a little more thoroughly and rigorously, and instead of pushing scrawled notes in a drawer at home, I type them up and distribute them in a more or less permanent repository. When I look at a picture and go “Hey, a crested wood fern! I like those!”, iNat captures that and makes it useful to all the others who might look at the picture.
For someone like you, the photos you take are not a “byproduct”, and I wouldn’t expect you to release most of your rights, any more than I’d expect one of my botanical consultant friends to feel obliged to ID observations. I think for the bulk of our users, though, photos are mostly a byproduct of scratching their itch (logging and observation and getting it IDd), and they’re not particularly concerned with what happens to them once they serve their purpose. Cazort’s identified what may be a missed opportunity, in that a lot of photos that iNat users are not interested in monetizing aren’t available for a a particular educational (and I think, valuable) purpose. On the other hand, I think some of these users may not be completely indifferent to the fate of their observation photos, and may feel strongly about the distinction between “-NC” and “-SA”. That is, they might be happy to release them without compensation, but only if no one else is being compensated for using those photos, either, which seems like a pretty natural emotional reaction.
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I have to say I think that response is unnecessarily combative @cmcheatle. Certainly, it’s @cazort’s decision to take on the particular almost-unpaid project they have chosen. However, it’s wrong to dismiss the very valid arguments they have made in relation to open content more generally.
As someone who spent about 10 years contributing to Wikipedia articles before I ever uploaded an fuzzy image to iNat, I strongly support the argument that piecemeal negotiation of image rights isn’t a scalable way to approach building freely available content. Certainly, someone creating this kind of content could try to request permission one by one for specific restrictively-licensed images, but that’s not a workable process at scale.
While you might be unconcerned about @cazort’s project, the exact same concerns apply to Wikipedia. iNat makes extensive use of Wikipedia content. It would seem a little hypocritical to contend that iNat users have no interest in improving the quality of that content.
It seems we both agree that iNat should do everything it can to inform users about available license choices. I think it would be very helpful if iNat could add a little more text to explain that CC-BY-NC prevents images from being used on Wikipedia.
Changing the default image license for a new user account from CC-BY-NC to, say, CC-BY-SA does not amount to “suggesting users should surrender their licensing rights to make a job you have chosen to do [easier]”. It’s a reasonable default for amateur photo sharing that allows images to be used widely, ensures the creator still gets credit and ensures any resulting content is also shareable. And it’s just the default, which takes effect only if the user decides to ignore iNat’s explanations of the various available licenses.
This is a great explanation of the type of ownership that many amateur contributors feel they have, in contrast to the very important ownership rights of professional photographers.
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Are you referring to iNaturalist or Wikipedia contributors here?
I’ve always assumed that, if neutrally asked to make a choice from all the options, most iNaturalist contributors would choose all rights reserved and would be concerned if they found one of their photos posted somewhere where they didn’t post it themselves. But I actually don’t have a good impression of what people prefer or if they care.
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I too am a relatively high volume contributor to Wiki projects, in my case Wikidata. The reality is anyone who wants to do significant contributions to that family of tools no matter how much they feel what they are doing contributes to the greater good etc needs to respect copyright requirements and work within the licensing guidelines that the Wikimedia Foundation applies to their sites.
I don’t feel that asking sites to change their policies to allow adding material to Wikimedia sites is an appropriate approach.
As stated, I have no issue with open licensing, however, I strongly feel it needs to be an educated, aware choice made by users. Licensing and similar areas should follow the principle of least surprise, what are users least likely to be surprised to find out is applied to their contributions.
Changing the iNat default to such an open terms one does not meet that standard. This is especially true given that iNat, unlike many other sites effectively requires users to upload photos for their observation data to be used elsewhere.
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I appreciate the arguments being made here but I wish we had more data to work with. Most users will never see the Forums or this discussion. Without knowing the actual opinions of the average user (both with, and without, their taking time to “read the fine print”), I feel like the discussion is purely philosophical.
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I asked this same question with the same motivations a few years ago. Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but I think it is reasonable for this to be one of the questions that gets asked when new users are being created.
“Which copyright protection would you like applied to your image?” Or something like it.
The default can be the full-monte copyright, but give the dropdown so that anyone who knows or cares can modify. The moment I discovered that public domain was an option, I switched mine over, and batch reconverted all of my previous observations to the same. I don’t expect to make any money on my crappy cell phone images, don’t particularly care about attribution of them, and want to promote a free and open ecosystem of images on this free and open platform about ecosystems.
If I ever become a professional photographer, I’ll pay more attention to all of that. Until then, have at it. I hope I’m helping build a better internet.
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I can tell you that the issue is confusing to me. I was actually surprised when I found out that Wikipedia could not use CC-BY-NC images since it is nominally a non-commercial venture. So, okay, if I make all my iNaturalist images CC-BY-SA, then they can be used on Wikipedia - great. But GBIF has different requirements, so making that change would remove all my images from GBIF, which I also don’t want. It seems that CC-BY is the only license that will allow my images to be included on both Wikipedia and GBIF while still retaining the attribution requirement. Do I have that right? I would argue that changing the default copyright option to accommodate Wikipedia usage at the expense of GBIF does not seem like a good solution even if it makes life easier for Wikipedia editors. Anyway, it may be worthwhile to at least note in the signup text that “anyone can use your image” explicitly does not apply to Wikipedia, because it is not obvious that Wikipedia would count as “commercial” in this context.
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This makes complete sense, and I actually share this sentiment myself. But…here’s where CC-BY-SA comes in. Because that license requires you to release the work and and derivative work for free if you distribute them (including by sale), this puts a natural cap on how a peron can make money off them.
You can’t realistically make money off something without adding value. For example, if I see a print for sale in a store, and it notes that it has a CC-BY-SA license and can be downloaded for free online at a specific URL, and it’s priced reasonably to compensate a person for the act of formatting and printing it and the convenience of it being for sale, I might buy it. If it’s too expensive, I’ll just go to the URL and download it and go to a print shop and pay them to print it.
In practice, I almost never see things for sale that have CC-BY-SA licenses. The license’s requirement that the work and any derivative works be freely available naturally limits the ability for people to make money off it.
But it does so without any of the other shortcomings I brought up in this thread. There is no ambiguity about what constitutes “commercial” or not. There is no restriction or incompatibility with major copyleft licenses, which would preclude inclusion in Wikipedia or copyleft textbooks.
Basically, the way I see it it does everything that NC “tries” to do, and does it better, yet while being less restrictive.
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This seems extremely unlikely given that users are already given a (somewhat honest) description of CC-BY-NC and a huge portion of them choose that license.
I suspect an overwhelming majority of users would choose a more permissive license if they thought it would be more beneficial to research, educational, and conservation purposes, because it’s unlikely that many of them would ever make any money off their photographs, and I bet nearly all of them care about advancing these other goals.
Nowadays, with good camera equipment being cheap, the professional photography sphere is pretty competitive and you have to be both really good as a photographer, and have considerable skill / effort in marketing yourself, in order to make money off selling photographs you already take. Among the professional photographers I’ve known, they almost exclusively make money off commissions, things like portraits, weddings, or photography of commercial buildings. People buying existing work for sale on stock photography sites is an uncommon source of income for most photographers because it’s so competitive, there is so much supply. And for nature photography that is focusing on identifying and documenting a species and its habitat, rather than on aethetics, which is what iNaturalist is all about, this is even less true. Few people are going to want to buy a picture of a caterpillar or oak tree that is carefully taken to show key ID characteristics.
This is why this whole conversation seems a bit ridiculous to me. Through this whole conversation I haven’t seen a compelling point that we’re doing anything other than splitting hairs.
I get the concerns in theory, but on a pragmatic level I’m just not seeing it. I see real downsides to the NC licenses, and I can understand why people object to the SA clause (even if I don’t share this objection), but I’m really struggling to understand why people seem to feel so strongly about the hypothetical of users getting upset by a well-presented choice of a more permissive license.
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I completely agree with this.
And the status quo surprises users in this way. It says that the presented license, CC-BY-NC is most useful to researchers, when it’s not.
This is all I want here…I want iNaturalist to stop pushing a license on users as a default license, using a misleading explanation that leads users to think it is more permissive or useful or less problematic than it actually is.
I am all about letting people make their own decisions. And I trust them. I trust that an overwhelming majority of users, if presented with a more honest choice of licenses, would pick a more permissive license like CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or perhaps leave it as public domain. Instead…they’re not given that option on signup, and instead they’re told that the CC-BY-NC license is the “best” choice for research, and of course, if they’re told that, few of them are going to ever revisit it.
And, if presented with honest information and not nudged towards CC-BY-NC, if users chose that, then that’s fine, I can just ignore those photos or records or whatever if I’m wanting to work with CC-BY-SA works.
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