How to best find copyright violations

Is there a efficient way to do copyright violation clean-up? I often will find them when ID’ing mammals (especially if I have the new user filter on), but am curious if there is a way to filter results in such a way that I can just run through a bunch of suspicious observations. If not, maybe this could be moved to feature requests I suppose… Perhaps using common dimensions for a screenshot or something. Anyway- I’m interested in any tips and tricks others have on finding shady observations.

Please forgive me if this has been addressed before, I did a quick search and didn’t see an answer.

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I flag when I see them, as I work thru today’s obs around Cape Town.
Those, photos from a book, or a serious professional photographer, stand out amongst all the others.

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Yesterday I found a suspicious photo that looked copyrighted. I went to their account and found one of my own photos posted in their account! I got ticked. Sure enough, three out of four observations posted by the user were copyrighted! I flagged them all and hope the user gets banned.

To your question, I’m not sure of an efficient way to find them other than just having a hunch (a new user posts this awesome shot that looks professional!) but to confirm it is copyrighted, just right click the photo and choose “Search Google for Image”. If its out there, it will come up. I do this quite a bit looking for people that steal my images without permission.

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/spotting-copyright-violations/3287

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A lot of copyright observations don’t have locations attached, so if you search for Casual grade obs uploaded by users who were created in the past week, you’ll probably find some.

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Sometimes you can find strange “out of range” observations that are actually copyright violations,
eg. European butterflies in South America or in Taiwan.

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