I am a bit confused about how the licensing options in iNaturalist work. I have my settings set to “No License” for observation, photo and sound (“You retain full copyright over your content aside from those rights granted to iNat in our Terms of Service”). I took this to mean that the data from my observations would not be shared with 3rd parties such as GBIF. Having done several random searches on GBIF I cannot find any of my iNaturalist records on there so this seems to go along with my thoughts. However, I have just found out that a large number (>2000) of records of mine have been exported from iNaturalist to iRecord (a UK site that you can enter records to go into the UK biological recording systems). The problem is a large number of these are duplicates of records that I have already submitted to the relevant local recorders or iRecord itself and in many of the cases the data are wrong (e.g iNat observations with a location accuracy of 2.34km have become records with a 10m accuracy - from the wrong spot). This has caused a problem that I have no idea how to solve. From how I thought the licensing system on iNaturalist works I think that this should never have happened or have I just been misinterpreting the information given? I am much better at identifying plants than understanding this kind of thing :)

I’m sorry to hear that. There are a couple reasons we do this: We use our own API, and we need to be able to access all observations regardless of license choice Third parties might need to access unlicensed observations as well. Not all use of the API involves the kind of republishing that would be subject to copyright law It is impossible for us to publish anything AND prevent people copying it. Copyright violation is as simple as taking a photo of a screen and posting that photo to Instagram. As an open data geek, part of the reason I use iNat is to share information. Creative Commons licenses were devised to share creative works with partial legal restrictions, but if I wanted absolute technical control of how the information gets disseminated, I would do as you suggest and not publish this information on the Internet. If that’s the path you choose to take, that’ll be a loss for us at iNat, but if you require that kind of control, I totally understand.

I certainly understand what you are saying and am in general agree with open data. However, the problem in my case is that the vast majority of my observations are made in the immediate vicinity of my home and giving too exact data online is to be frank dangerous (I have personal experience of this). This is why I enter observations with such vague location details (not actually that vague as I live in a fairly sparsely populated area). However, as apparently this now means that incorrect record data is going into third party sites this is a problem. The solution does seem to be that I stop posting observations, at least from my local area but I don’t know how I marry that up with my long standing iNat addiction :) Anyway, thanks for the help. I have sent a message to iRecord and hopefully they can get the current records problem sorted out.

[image] tiggrx: However, the problem in my case is that the vast majority of my observations are made in the immediate vicinity of my home and giving too exact data online is to be frank dangerous (I have personal experience of this). Sharing location data is a different issue than licensing. @kueda correct me if I’m wrong, but all you have to do to protect your location data is to mark the geoprivacy as “obscured” or “private”, which you can do from the app or the website. That should prevent the actual location from being accessible by anyone except you and iNaturalist administrators (if my understanding is correct). Personally, I mark all the observations near my house as “obscured”.

Yes, geoprivacy is one way to address this issue, but you should always be aware that partially disclosing location information usually means only partial privacy, and obscured coordinates on iNat are no exception. Much like the lock on your house, it will dissuade most people, but it may not stop someone who really, really wants that information from combining even a vague location with other contextual information to refine a guess at where the true coordinates are. I also obscure records from my house. The level of privacy we provide is good enough for me, but everyone needs to make their own decision about how much is enough.

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.

@tiggrx - I’m curious is there a way to drill into the details of a record by clicking on it on the dot on the iRecord site ? I’ve certainly never created an account on there but just did so. I have very few records on iNaturalist from the UK; but as a check, searched for records for Eurasian Moorhen on the iRecord site from the very day and location where I put one into iNat. While my observations are licensed as open, my photos are licensed on iNat as all rights reserved. I’m curious to see if they have uploaded my photo. It sure does seem like they are harvesting records from iNat, as I filtered the iRecord site search to records sourced from iNat, and mine is the only iNat record for the species loaded from the UK on the date I saw it.

[image] kueda: In the specific cases you cited, GBIF stays in sync with iNat on a weekly basis, so if you change your license choice for all your observations, GBIF should pick up on that in a week and remove any records from iNat it had under your previous license choice. I’m not sure how iRecord gets data from iNat. We don’t generate a pre-made archive for them like we do for GBIF, so presumably they’re using (or once used our API). Maybe they only sync of up yearly, or maybe they don’t sync up at all and they retrieved the data in a one-time event. This was not my understanding of how a Creative Commons license works. The licenses say specifically “The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.” Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that, once you license and publish (i.e. upload to iNat) content licensed as Creative Commons, that version of the content is forever licensed thus. Nothing stops you from re-licensing a work and making any subsequent changes to that work be unlicensed for public distribution (i.e. all-rights-reserved), but the version that you originally published as CC will continue to be available for use under that license, and it’s only subsequent modifications that will remain yours only. You can make the latter explicit by using the CC-BY-ND (no derivatives) license. With this in mind, all downstream data aggregators such as GBIF can use those original observations that one licensed as CC however they see fit (as long as they respect the terms of the license).

Similar to Tiggrx’s original post: I’m also unclear on the scope of the “observation” license. I’m well aware of copyright concepts regarding photographs and audio recording. Does the Observation license apply solely to the date, time, coordinates, and optional descriptive text? Or to all of the above except descriptive text (the only field where creative authorship can be exercised)? I’m assuming iNaturalist is subject to U.S. law, no matter where a user lives or where an a observation was recorded, if iNat’s servers and headquarters are US based. Raw data is largely not copyrightable in the U.S. Per U.S. Copyright Office Circular 33: “To be copyrightable, a work must qualify as an original work of authorship under the copyright law.” I am no expert, but I think if copyright cannot apply to an entity, then it is is by default in the public domain, no matter what someone declares it to be. The concept of crossing a threshold of originality is key. Facts and ideas themselves are not copyrightable: e.g. a simple phrase like “a square has 4 sides”, the color red, a drawing of a square, and compilations of data (such as a recipe or a list of numbers in a phone book) are not copyrightable. Copyrightable entities must exceed the threshold of originality (which is interpreted differently by different countries). So while a photograph of a lizard is eligible for copyright (the threshold of originality met by choices of composition, camera angle, etc.), the nonvisual, abstract data representation of “organism=lizard; time= 5:28 PM; date= May 10, 2018, location Main Street Park, Foosville, California, United States” is probably ineligible. Similarly, a simple straightforward text phrase like “I saw a brown lizard on a log” in the Description field is uncopyrightable, but a short poem describing the lizard in creative, literary prose probably would be copyrightable. Sorry for the wall of text. in short: as iNat sees it, what pieces of data does “Observation license” refer to?

[image] kueda: Yes, geoprivacy is one way to address this issue, but you should always be aware that partially disclosing location information usually means only partial privacy, and obscured coordinates on iNat are no exception. True, but true regardless of the license, right?

Can someone explain licensing to me please

General

bouteloua April 30, 2019, 12:54am 11

No, users can separately license the observations themselves, as well as photos and sounds.

Provide separate checkboxes for media and observation data licensing upon sign up

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Can someone explain licensing to me please

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