Description of need:
As I understand it, a user can currently change their photo license retroactively. However, this change is not shown on the photo page. I think it should be shown clearly on that page that a license was X until a certain date and was changed to Y at that point.
Feature request details:
When you upload a photo and give it a permissive license, people can use it according to that license. However, if you change that and leave no trace of that change, it becomes legally very unclear whether or not a photo was used in a proper way.
There is a separate feature request to make it clearer when people change their photo license retroactively, where I read about a specific example of a wikipedia photo license that was flagged to be incompatible. This was simply due to the fact that it was actually uploaded under a permissive license, which was then changed. The only way this could be shown was by using a third-party website (Internet Archive) that had a previous version stored of the page.
I think people should not depend on this information being available in a third-party website. Someone could get into real trouble for this without being at fault for using a photo at the time when it was permissively licensed. Let’s add something like this to remove all ambiguity:
Something related to note: technically, Creative Commons licenses aren’t revocable. From the Creative Commons FAQ:
CC licenses are not revocable. Once something has been published under a CC license, licensees may continue using it according to the license terms for the duration of applicable copyright and similar rights. As a licensor, you may stop distributing under the CC license at any time, but anyone who has access to a copy of the material may continue to redistribute it under the CC license terms.
The sentence “without being at fault for using a photo at the time when it was permissively licensed” in the original post is what made me think of this, since that sentence implies that once an observation/photo’s license is changed the CC license no longer applies, when that’s not true. I don’t have a specific point to make about this info other than that.
Thanks for approving and sharing those links. I could also not yet find a feature request for this specific issue.
Thanks. I also read that in the license and other discussions. I am not a lawyer and don’t know well enough how it works, but I can see why they should be considered non-revocable. Allowing people to retroactively change a license to a more restrictive one doesn’t seem like a great idea from that angle. However, I also appreciate that iNat has to weigh having a system that is not exactly bulletproof from this angle while also dealing with users that don’t fully grasp what licenses mean until they are deep into uploading their photos onto the platform. Anyway, that discussion is best had here.
For now I think if this is allowed, it should be transparently documented at the least.
Thanks, I didn’t know that. Had a look and it’s quite a good system. Just showing the current license and then a HISTORY link that shows a popup with the history. And a note explaining that it’s only available since a certain date (which would be important to also not make it appear like the absence of a history means it has always been the same). Adding screenshots here for inspiration - I think they set it up nicely.
this seems like a lot of work for very little benefit.
these are very old examples of use cases. i’m fairly certain that Wiki folks have since created a bot to check the licensing of media sourced from iNaturalist which makes the problems in those examples moot. do you have a recent example use case?
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in the grand scheme of things, i haven’t actually checked, but i would expect that there are relatively very few cases where folks change their licenses in a way that it matters for any users of photos or sounds. in most cases of license changes, i would expect that users are going in the direction of less restrictive as opposed to more restrictive. moreover, i would expect that most users are not using so many media assets that they could not capture their own record of licenses for these assets, and i would expect it would be even less common for the license holders to actually find and challenge the use of their assets by others. in other words, i would expect that only a tiny number of people would ever actually use the proposed feature. (and why would you ever implement something that so few people would ever use?)
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finally, at least for photos, there is already a monthly snapshot of licenses in the AWS Open Dataset metadata. if someone really wanted to go through the effort of pursuing a legal challenge related to copyright, then it wouldn’t be relatively that much more effort to get the license history from that repository.
I tend to agree with this. I’m not a developer I believe we’d have to create more cells in our database to track this, increasing its size, plus UI for the end users, and I think it would apply to a small number of situations.
