Users retain ownership of their comments, but are given the ability to license only their observations and their photos. The ToS says “Unless you specify otherwise when you post Content, you agree to license Content you contribute to the Platform under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.” Does this mean all comments are CC BY-NC?
This is an interesting nuance of the licensing framework of iNaturalist that I hadn’t considered, but I think you are reading that correctly. Comments outside of an OP observation would seem to be CC-BY-NC.
For users who might have some concern about retaining copyrighted control of the intellectual content of comments, the simple answer would seem to be, “Don’t post it”.
I don’t know what an “OP observation” is but I do know that an observation is licensed independent of the observation’s photos. By default, both are CC-BY-NC but each may be modified separately. I assume that if the license of an observation (not photo) is changed, then the license of the corresponding comments is changed as well. However, I do not understand the practical implications of changing the license of an observation so I’ve left mine at the default for the time being.
Makes me also wonder how direct messages are licensed exactly - beyond the fact that users grant the platform a “world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt, and publish” them. Sounds like PD/CC0?
“OP observation” refers the original poster’s observation, i.e. the entirety of the initial content by the original poster, excluding follow-up identifications, comments, or annotations by others on that observation. I take the license on one person’s “observation” to refer collectively to the photo(s), other media, associated metadata, original comments by the poster, and the entirety of that observation as originally posted. Subsequent comments or IDs by others constitute secondary material which I would think is not part of the original observation and thus outside iNat’s licensing concept for an “observation”. I’m not a lawyer nor am I iNat staff, so I may be off-base.