Exporting project data and data ownership

[bouteloua]

Chris is right, and whether or not an observation is in a particular project has no bearing on whether it’s exportable by other iNat users. Anyone can go to the observations search page, enter some search items, and click “Download” in the filters drop-down, which brings them to a filtered version of the Export page: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export

As far as whether limiting/preventing the export of observations would be a feature that would be implemented in the future, I have doubts, since iNat is a place to share data.

Also note that each user has the options to set their photo copyright and observation copyright settings (on each observation separately and also in their account settings), but as far as observation copyright goes:

@kueda

…your license is a declaration that you are ceding your legal copyright to a work within whatever legal jurisdictions respect such rights and the ability to cede them with licenses. It is not a technical barrier to retrieving copies of your work from iNaturalist, so you might declare that you retain full copyright and that you don’t want anyone re-using your work, but the only thing stopping someone from doing so is the risk of you suing them. …

I should also point out that while photos are subject to copyright in most jurisdictions, observations may not be, as they represent facts about the world and not necessarily the kinds of creative works copyright was designed to protect (unless you write a description). On iNat we assume observations are copyrightable, but the only way to really test this is in court.