The way I understand it, the licensing is for the photos themselves, not the data. It’s to protect people who may be uploading their livelihoods (ie, photographers, artists, etc) up by outlining what rights we want to give people who may want to use our photos, and how they can show them. No one can legally say ‘well, i found your photo on iNat, and thus it’s free for me to use in my article that I’m not crediting/paying you for’.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ if you scroll down, this outlines what each license allows.