Can someone explain licensing to me please

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.

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

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@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.

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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?

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True, but true regardless of the license, right?

Yes, obscuration works the same for every copyright license type.

I tried looking into this a little while ago for a discussion of account deletions and what happens does/should happen to data if someone deletes their account. My key takeaways from reading through the legal sources I could find online were:

  1. as others have mentioned, you can’t really copyright facts/data in the U.S. If you publish a fact, it is available for others to use as they see fit. Some facts might be protected in the contexts of other legal statuses (like patents), but this shouldn’t really apply to iNat data. So it seems like if you publish data on iNat (or anywhere) it doesn’t have legal protections, and the CC license wouldn’t really apply (facts aren’t “creative”).

  2. If you publish something under a CC license and someone accesses it under that license, it is available to them in perpetuity (ie, those rights cannot be revoked if you change the license later). This is the point that @mftasp made.

One implication of this is that it doesn’t seem like iNat would be legally required to remove observation data for users who leave the site/delete their accounts.

In regards to the concern about geoprivacy around one’s home, I think iNat does allow for one geofenced location per user to enable some protection for people’s home addresses. Though again, as others have pointed out, if you make a lot of observations from one obscured location, it wouldn’t be impossible for a really dedicated user to figure out more or less what the location is.

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They’ve always allowed for full deletion. Even of IDs which has been controversial.

In terms of obscuring, geofences don’t exist but may someday. However, because of how the obscuring works, it doesn’t matter how many things you obscure, you can’t infer a centroid because it’s scattered over a set rectangle

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@cmcheatle 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.

I’m not sure if you can get to the record details or not by clicking on the dot but you can search for the record.
Your Moorhen record shows source (iNat), species, site name, date, your name & grid reference (8 figure, i.e. equivalent to 1m square location accuracy). The photo is not shown.

In my case some of the observations have imported my photos in others not, all of the photos that I looked at having been uploaded to iNat with no CC-license set.

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A lot of information to digest from various people’s replies for which thank you.

What I am mainly getting out of this is that the whole subject is a bit of a minefield and many people either don’t know what the situation actually is or are assuming that their understanding of the matter is correct.

It would be very helpful for iNaturalist to have some much clearer guidelines on this. Certainly the information that is given where you are setting the licenses falls very short in my mind, especially for the the ‘no license’ option.

There does seem to be a general feeling that the observation itself aside from photo (and sounds?) is not copyrightable in which case (as asked by someone else above) what does the choice on iNat for licensing the observation mean? It appears that it may well be pointless and in that case extremely misleading.

In my particular case the transfer of my observation data to iRecord may well be completely legal but the transfer of my photos not (my settings have been no license for several years and some of the photos transferred I uploaded to iNat as recently as last month). Why they have transferred photos for only some of the records I have no idea.

As to geoprivacy I think it is clear that I have been going about this the wrong way and should have been obscuring my location rather than decreasing the location accuracy (this did occur to me at 12:30am when I was in bed, so I’m glad to see others suggested the same thing).

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I can’t speak to the legality of the observations license, though just a note that they are apparently working through some improvements to the photo licensing options: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/improve-viewing-editing-copyright-information-on-observations/308

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yeah, there was a thread about this not too long ago, but generally it is better just to obscure. Note also that decreasing accuracy may not help with privacy if the centroid point is still in the place you want to keep private. Long ago iNat used a different obscuring method by which the obscured points randomly were placed in a ~10 km circle around the real location. When that was the case a large number of observations did indeed create a big circle around the obscured location, and back then I did use the method you are describing as well, and also moved the underlying point. But since that time, the obscuring has become better so that method is frowned upon by some (but not all as you will see if you dig up that thread)

@charlie: Note also that decreasing accuracy may not help with privacy if the centroid point is still in the place you want to keep private.

I was very careful to make sure that the central point was not the right location. Unfortunately this has resulted in a lot of records on iRecord with incorrect details since they have focused to the central point.

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Yeah that is one of the reasons not to do it. Unfortunately gbif and most similar aggregator maps don’t do a good job of showing uncertainty or obscuring from what I’ve seen.

Yes, iNat does allow for full deletion, my point was it doesn’t seem like they would have to. Which is to say, if they wanted to change this in the future, they could probably do so without much trouble.

And for figuring out a place with the new obscuring, it certainly is more difficult, but still possible. If you have a set of observations that you think/know were taken in the same place, you can just take the bounding boxes and keep overlaying them. Whatever area lies within all the bounding boxes is your limit of uncertainty for the actual location. It works out this way even for single observations in coastal areas sometimes where only a little bit of land/water is in the bounding box for an obviously terrestrial/aquatic organism. So it’s not a perfect solution.

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This doesn’t work (except for the coastal overlap issue) because they are laid out on a set grid that is the same for all observations posted. For instance below is the area near my house where i obscure a lot of stuff, and my house isn’t in the center of that rectangle. (no it isn’t one of the pink pins either).

image

On a side note please don’t post things about figuring out obscured observations on the forum. You are correct that the system isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t make sense to broadcast loopholes publicly. Meanwhile, for anything with serious security risk or otherwise top secret, it’s probably better just not to post it here or anywhere else on the Internet. It’s unfortunate, but nothing private on the internet is ever really guaranteed private.

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Thanks for correcting me about the bounding boxes.
However, I do think it’s appropriate to talk about obscuring on the forum in some cases. Most generally, lots of people ask questions about obscuring their observations, and many of them have good reasons for doing so. Some might even have to do with personal safety, so if there is an issue where obscured observations might not be as secure as someone might think they are, it could be very important for them to know.
Another good reason is that transparency stops bad information. For instance, I just learned from you that the obscuring works better than I thought it did (based on what I had read in another post a while ago, though I can’t remember where now). So I actually have more confidence in the system based on getting good information from you.
And lastly, I don’t/didn’t think I was writing about anything top secret; it certainly wasn’t privileged info from anyone associated with iNat or anything. The box issue (that I was wrong about) I had read about on the old forum, probably years ago, and the coastal thing was from my own experience looking at observations on NE coastlines. So that info was accessible to anyone.
So I am hopeful that someone reading these posts will have a good understanding of how obscuring works on iNat and be able to make informed decisions about their own observations. And thanks again for showing me my mistake!

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Hi, sorry if i was unclear at all, I think talking about obscuring and explaining that it isn’t 100% perfect is totally fine. I just don’t think we should post specific loopholes and ‘hacks’ about how to get around it, because it just makes it easier for other people to find those too. If that makes any sense at all.

I don’t think what you posted was anything too problematic but we’ve had people describe in depth how to get information on where certain obscured observations are, so i wanted to say something before we went that route. A lot of these loopholes aren’t too hard to find or are discussed elsewhere, but i think making it really explicit and easy to infer observations people meant to be private (or that were auto obscured) is going to do more harm than good.

And, anything super secret, like putting someone’s safety at risk, probably shouldn’t be on the Internet. iNat is safer than some sites because it does give you options, but if you have a serious stalker after you or some similar issue, you have to be extra careful. Doxxing someone really isn’t all that hard, based on photos, check-ins, and things like that. It’s a nasty world out there. When it comes to obscured locations at ones own house, that’s a personal decision that should be made in an informed way. In terms of auto obscure I think it’s really overzealous in some cases but also really important. If you find something that is very high risk like ginseng or a rhino, consider not posting it at all, here or anywhere else for that matter.

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