Description of need:
Copyright violations tend to be a repeat offense, and catching / warning / suspending these users early would massively cut down on curator workload (I say this having recently helped flag every single image posted by a user with over 500 observations… it was painful).
I’ve been thinking about suggesting this for a while, but during this year’s CNC event it really underlined how helpful some kind of automatic system would be.
It would also help to ensure copyright violations are treated more equally (currently, there’s a lot of variation on how many warnings someone gets / how long an opportunity they get to remove things), and help resolve the language barrier issue (I am often not sure the users I message really understand my warnings)
Feature request details:
This is how I envision it going:
- User posts copyrighted image
- Someone flags it
- The first flag generates a warning that is sent to their email, (in whatever language their account is set to), with:
a. An explanation about posting only one’s own photos
b. A link to the flagged observation with an explanation of how to delete a photo
c. A link to the flag itself, for them to respond if they think it is an erroneous flag
If the user receives X number of copyright flags (5? 10?), they get another message, warning them that they need to remove the flagged images or their account will be suspended.
After an appropriate waiting period, if no action has been taken, the account is automatically suspended, and the other observations on the account become casual-grade until such a time as the open copyright flags against the account are resolved.
Obviously there is some potential for abuse of the system by malicious flagging, but since the automatic suspension is already a feature with spam flags, and that has not caused too many issues, I don’t feel this would be too different.
3 flags seems reasonable.
First one can be an honest mistake by a newbie.
Second one, after a warning. (You are not learning to iNat)
Third is a deliberate habit. Don’t care about iNat’s ‘rules’.
7 Likes
That is, if the flags occurred over time, not on three observations posted the same day.
I assume that many images were not all posted at the same time? Did this user keep doing it after being flagged for the first time?
In that particular case, they were mass-uploaded over a couple of hours on the same day, and I suspended them immediately because they were coming in faster than we could flag them.
6 Likes
I am using some of my pictures on other platforms too, where i upload them independently. means some of my iNat pictures can for example also be found on wikimedia… in addition i have seen websites using my iNat or wikimedia pictures without giving proper credit. I would hate getting suspended for using my pictures elsewhere or for others not giving proper credit, just saying.
I usually upload to iNat first in case that matters.
Side-question: in case somebody is using iNat pictures without proper attribution on the web, will iNat do something about that? Or will all iNat-users have to complain with the copyright violating party in person?
1 Like
This is the case were the link to the flag comes into play - you can then comment there, and get the flag resolved by a curator. As it currently stands, you get no notification if someone flags your stuff for copyright, and although curators are generally supposed to warn and wait before suspending, the actual practice of that varies widely by who the curator is and what mood they happen to be in.
Also, although it’d certainly be an inconvenience, unwarranted suspensions are easily resolved and re-instated.
Although now that I think of it, if the automatic suspension thing only happened to accounts under a certain age, it’d still catch 95% of the problematic ones while preventing cases like yours from becoming accidental false positives.
13 Likes
I think some flavor of this would be a good idea. I would add that I think one issue that can occur is someone uploads a bunch (10s) of copyright infringing images, but then actually does respond to comments after a while. This doesn’t happen often, but does happen. I would want to be sure that a user had logged in/read a warning/then continued to create new infringing observations before suspending them.
I would also note that deleting observations is not super-obvious in the different apps/web (probably because it generally isn’t encouraged). Same for deleting photos (this takes some work on the web). So any requirement to do this would need to have clear guidance/a help page, etc. available in the users language if they are to be suspended for not doing it in my opinion.
2 Likes
I actually don’t know if this would be a good idea for one major reason. There are instances where it appears to be copyright(screenshot of website) when it actually turns out that the person who made the website uploaded it to Inat. I had flagged someone’s observations when I first started and they were not copyright, but appeared to be at first glance.
If this would happen, only curators that flag copyright would count to automatic warnings and suspensions, since I could see someone using “copyright” as a way to warn/ban Inatters as a form of retribution.