Platform: Web
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Replicated in Chromium 80.0.3987.100, Firefox 73.0, Chrome 80.0.3987.100.
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: Search pages filtered by license, e.g.:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/49883-Betula-papyrifera/browse_photos?photo_license=cc0
Description of problem:
Images with the wrong license are showing up in the search. For example, the page above returned a search containing this image:
https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/30899473
and numerous other ones. In this case, that one has a CC BY-NC license, but I had searched for public domain (CC0) license. These licenses are not in any sense interchangeable as CC BY-NC has far more restrictions on the image’s use.
I use this feature frequently to locate reusable (i.e. open-licensed) images.
This is concerning to me though because it could give people the wrong impression that the images are licensed with a particular license, such as public domain, when they are not and this could lead to people unintentionally committing copyright violations.
Has anyone else encountered this? Until this is fixed I would caution people to make sure to actually check the copyright notice manually on any image before using it, because it merely showing up in a filtered search is apparently not a safe guarantee that it is licensed using that license.
Here are two screenshots:
