I was wondering do you guys ever put your images out into the public domains? I see that most people that have - let’s say - better quality images, almost never put them in PD. Why is that?
Do you mean, a completely open license? I use CC-BY, and most iNatters use CC-BY-NC.
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I’ve seen what you mean. I license all my iNat photos as CC0, but they are just low-to-medium quality cell phone pictures. People with really nice photos are likely to have invested a lot of time and money into their photography and are usually serious hobbyists or semi/professional photographers. They often opt for an all-rights-reserved license, and I assume they want to retain copyright so they would have to be compensated for any use of their work by others.
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I agree, people with nice photos have often invested time/money/effort. Even if they don’t want monetary compensation, they probably would still like recognition via attribution, so they might not go full PD in that case.
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I recently switched my photos to PD. I do take nice photos, but lots of Fungi and they are my contributions to science. I don’t really care to monetize that. It’s like volunteering for me.
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I don’t know the quality of my photos, but sometimes they are used by other people, I believe in no value of strict licences, they stop good people from using observations (and importing to GBIF) and never stop other people from stealing photos. Everything I have is CC BY-NC with hope to see people using links back to iNat.
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That’s true. And it also gives the photographer the right to decline use of their content in projects they don’t like, whereas CC-BY or CC0 means the photos can be used by anyone for any reason.
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I don’t put my images in public domain, typically, but if asked, I am generally pleased to have them used for educational purposes. It’s really easy to ask.
All the images that I gave to Wikimedia are in the public domain, but as far as I know, only one of them is used on iNaturalist.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donax_fossor_2014.jpg
My photos are licensed as CC-BY because while I have no objections to their use on Wikipedia, field guides, other websites etc, I would like recognition if someone wants to use them. I find it unlikely that anyone would, though, since although some of them are pretty good, they’re definitely not professional-grade.
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