I tried checking before for such a topic but didn’t find anything suiting.
Basically i made a quiz based on iNaturalist research grade observations that allows to train on any taxa and in any given place. It has been tested and updated fairly well i believe, but before making it public i want to make sure there wouldn’t be license violations in using the pictures from iNaturalist observations without particular restriction regarding license ? The quiz was built in a way to help improve identification, as well as remove errors in research grade observations and encourage to add “presence status tags” (i.e. native/endemic/introduced) to local checklists for species. And obviously to have fun because why not. Also Should i use iNaturalist logo, or would that be perceived as an official website when it is not ?
Thank’s in advance.
you might want to make sure you are following all the rules for using iNat’s API.
as for photo licenses, many photos are fully copyrighted and you should not be taking them for other purposes before asking explicit permission from the photographers. how are you filtering those out?
as for using iNat logos, you’ll have to be more specific, but in general I’d avoid implying you have their approval - much less that it’s an official site.
For now, what i do is filter in the API request the observation license to only keep the CC ones that aren’t ND (photo_license=cc0,cc-by,cc-by-nc), as the website wouldn’t any commercial intent. I added credits for each observation, links to the observations and license type, after each question is answered (as to avoid cheating by checking the observation on iNaturalist). I also added cache for the API request not to exceed iNaturalist rules of API use, but i’ll need to investigate that part further to be sure it is indeed impossible to exceed limits set for API requests.
Regarding the logo, what i meant is that i saw that existing sites (like the iNatGuessr one) show a “Powered by iNaturalist” logo, and i’d like to use it too but won’t if that’s not allowed. In the same way, i would’ve liked to name the site “iNat Quiz” or something like that but i won’t if i can’t.
Thank you for your answer.
I’m not a lawyer but it seems like you’ve covered all the bases with respect to licensing. What about cc-by-sa? You should be able to use that too, right?
Good to hear ! I didn’t include cc-by-sa because it seems it would require me to use pictures without showing them cropped sometimes, or other slight details that to me seem unsignificant but i didn’t want to take any risk. Also from what i’ve seen from an old post, i think they represent about 3% (cc-by-sa & cc-by-nc-sa) of global observation, which is not a huge loss in amount of available pictures.
I hope to soon show what the quiz looks like, i think it is pretty close to ready.
Are you not confusing the SA and ND conditions ?
→ SA means Adaptations must be shared under the same terms. so this means if you use images under CC-**-sa licence, you should provide these images under the same condition (CC-*-*sa)
→ ND means No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted. so I would rather identify the ND condition as banning cropping images.
see : https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
I think you are right, i’ll make those changes, thanks !